"Come. I hate your story,"—and laughing, despite his wrath,—"your conscience needs a bath."
"Perhaps." And they went down to the boat, the German still laughing.
"What amuses you?"
"Nothing. Nothing amuses one as much as nothing. I should have been a diplomatist at the court of Love." And to himself: "Is it well for these children? Here is another tangle, and if—if anything should go amiss here are three sad hearts. D—— the Jacobin cur! I ought to kill him. That would settle things."
For many days De Courval saw nothing of his enemy. Schmidt, who owned many houses and mortgages and good irredeemable ground rents, was busy.
Despite the fear of foreign war and the rage of parties, the city was prosperous and the increase of chariots, coaches, and chaises so great as to cause remark. House rents rose, the rich of the gay set drank, danced, gambled, and ran horses on the road we still call Race Street. Wages were high. All the wide land felt confidence, and speculation went on, for the poor in lotteries, for the rich in impossible canals never to see water.
On August 6 of this fatal year '93, Uncle Josiah came to fetch the Pearl away for a visit, and, glad as usual to be the bearer of bad news, told Schmidt that a malignant fever had killed a child of Dr. Hodge and three more. It had come from the Sans Culottes, privateer, or because of damaged coffee fetched from he knew not where.
The day after, Dr. Redman, President of the College of Physicians, was of opinion that this was the old disease of 1762—the yellow plague. Schmidt listened in alarm. Before the end of August three hundred were dead, almost every new case being fatal. On August 20, Schmidt was gone for a day. On his return at evening he said: "I have rented a house on the hill above the Falls of Schuylkill. We move out to-morrow. I know this plague. El vomito they call it in the West Indies."
Mrs. Swanwick protested.