“No slippers!  In your shirt!  That is the way to kill yourself!  Why do you suspect me?—­If this is to be the way of it, I wish you good-day, sir.  Here have I served you these ten years, I have spent money on you till my savings are all gone, to spare trouble to that poor M. Schmucke, crying like a child on the stairs—­and this is my reward!  You have been spying on me.  God has punished you!  It serves you right!  Here I am straining myself to carry you, running the risk of doing myself a mischief that I shall feel all my days.  Oh dear, oh dear! and the door left open too—­”

“You were talking with some one.  Who was it?”

“Here are notions!” cried La Cibot.  “What next!  Am I your bond-slave?  Am I to give account of myself to you?  Do you know that if you bother me like this, I shall clear out!  You shall take a nurse.”

Frightened by this threat, Pons unwittingly allowed La Cibot to see the extent of the power of her sword of Damocles.

“It is my illness!” he pleaded piteously.

“It is as you please,” La Cibot answered roughly.

She went.  Pons, confused, remorseful, admiring his nurse’s scalding devotion, reproached himself for his behavior.  The fall on the paved floor of the dining-room had shaken and bruised him, and aggravated his illness, but Pons was scarcely conscious of his physical sufferings.

La Cibot met Schmucke on the staircase.

“Come here, sir,” she said.  “There is bad news, that there is!  M. Pons is going off his head!  Just think of it! he got up with nothing on, he came after me—­and down he came full-length.  Ask him why—­he knows nothing about it.  He is in a bad way.  I did nothing to provoke such violence, unless, perhaps, I waked up ideas by talking to him of his early amours.  Who knows men?  Old libertines that they are.  I ought not to have shown him my arms when his eyes were glittering like carbuckles.”

Schmucke listened.  Mme. Cibot might have been talking Hebrew for anything that he understood.

“I have given myself a wrench that I shall feel all my days,” added she, making as though she were in great pain. (Her arms did, as a matter of fact, ache a little, and the muscular fatigue suggested an idea, which she proceeded to turn to profit.) “So stupid I am.  When I saw him lying there on the floor, I just took him up in my arms as if he had been a child, and carried him back to bed, I did.  And I strained myself, I can feel it now.  Ah! how it hurts!—­I am going downstairs.  Look after our patient.  I will send Cibot for Dr. Poulain.  I had rather die outright than be crippled.”

La Cibot crawled downstairs, clinging to the banisters, and writhing and groaning so piteously that the tenants, in alarm, came out upon their landings.  Schmucke supported the suffering creature, and told the story of La Cibot’s devotion, the tears running down his cheeks as he spoke.  Before very long the whole house, the whole neighborhood indeed, had heard of Mme. Cibot’s heroism; she had given herself a dangerous strain, it was said, with lifting one of the “nutcrackers.”