This watching of Camille saddened even her.  When she was with him his pride bore him up:  but when he was alone as he thought, his anguish and despair were terrible, and broke out in so many ways that often Rose shrank in terror from her peep hole.

She dared not tell Josephine the half of what she saw:  what she did tell her agitated her so terribly:  and often Rose had it on the tip of her tongue to say, “Do pray go and see if you can say nothing that will do him good;” but she fought the impulse down.  This battle of feeling, though less severe than her sister’s, was constant; it destroyed her gayety.  She, whose merry laugh used to ring like chimes through the house, never laughed now, seldom smiled, and often sighed.

Dr. Aubertin was the last to succumb to the deep depression, but his time came:  and he had been for a day or two as grave and as sad as the rest, when one day that Rose was absent, spying on Camille, he took the baroness and Josephine into his confidence; and condescended finally to ask their advice.

“It is humiliating,” said he, “after all my experience, to be obliged to consult unprofessional persons.  Forty years ago I should have been too wise to do so.  But since then I have often seen science baffled and untrained intelligences throw light upon hard questions:  and your sex in particular has luminous instincts and reads things by flashes that we men miss with a microscope.  Our dear Madame Raynal suspected that plausible notary, and to this day I believe she could not tell us why.”

Josephine admitted as much very frankly.

“There you see,” said the doctor.  “Well, then, you must help me in this case.  And this time I promise to treat your art with more respect.”

“And pray who is it she is to read now?” asked the baroness.

“Who should it be but my poor patient?  He puzzles me.  I never knew a patient so faint-hearted.”

“A soldier faint-hearted!” exclaimed the baroness.  “To be sure these men that storm cities, and fire cannon, and cut and hack one another with so much spirit, are poor creatures compared with us when they have to lie quiet and suffer.”

The doctor walked the room in great excitement.  “It is not his wound that is killing him, there’s something on his mind.  You, Josephine, with your instincts do help me:  do pray, for pity’s sake, throw off that sublime indifference you have manifested all along to this man’s fate.”

“She has not,” cried the baroness, firing up.  “Did I not see her lining his dressing-gown for him? and she inspects everything that he eats:  do you not?”

“Yes, mother.”  She then suggested in a faltering voice that time would cure the patient, and time alone.

“Time! you speak as if time was a quality:  time is only a measure of events, favorable or unfavorable; it kills as many as it cures.”

“Why, you surely would not imply his life is in any danger?” This was the baroness.