The priest would reply:
“He has not yet given an opinion, madame.”
But one evening the abbe replied: “Madame, your son has got the small-pox.”
She uttered a scream of terror and fled from the room.
When her maid came to her room the following morning she noticed at once a strong odor of burnt sugar, and she found her mistress, with wide-open eyes, her face pale from lack of sleep, and shivering with terror in her bed.
As soon as the shutters were opened Mme. Herrnet asked:
“How is George?”
“Oh, not at all well to-day, madame.”
She did not rise until noon, when she ate two eggs with a cup of tea, as if she herself had been ill, and then she went out to a druggist’s to inquire about prophylactic measures against the contagion of small-pox.
She did not come home until dinner time, laden with medicine bottles, and shut herself up at once in her room, where she saturated herself with disinfectants.