“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.
“Madame, if the case was not grave, should I take this unusual step? I tell you if some change does not take place soon, he will be a dead man in another fortnight. That is all TIME will do for him.”
The baroness uttered an exclamation of pity and distress. Josephine put her hand to her bosom, and a creeping horror came over her, and then a faintness. She sat working mechanically, and turning like ice within. After a few minutes of this, she rose with every appearance of external composure and left the room. In the passage she met Rose coming hastily towards the salon laughing: the first time she had laughed this many a day. Oh, what a contrast between the two faces that met there—the one pale and horror stricken, the other rosy and laughing!
“Well, dear, at last I am paid for all my trouble, and yours, by a discovery; he never drinks a drop of his medicine; he pours it into the ashes under the grate; I caught him in the fact.”
“Then this is too much: I can resist no longer. Come with me,” said Josephine doggedly.
“Where?”
“To him.”