"Ah, you're a gay one! Now—put on your velvet cap—so. We'll find a bride for you some day—some day, when you're a tall, proud man. Who's your father, Arty? Pah! it's nothing. You'll make somebody's heart ache all the same,—eh, Arty, boy?"
"Do you understand her, Miss Maverick?" says the mother.
"Not wholly," said Adèle; and the two visitors stepped in noiselessly.
The child, bedizened with finery, was standing upon the bed where the sick woman lay, with a long feather from the cock's tail waving from his cap. Madame Arles, with the hot flush of the fever upon her, looked—saving the thinness—as she might have looked twenty years before. And as her flashing eye caught the newcomers, her voice broke out wildly again,—
"Here's the bride, and here's the priest! Where's the groom? Where's the groom? Where's the groom, I say?"
The violence of her manner made poor Adèle shiver.
The boy laughed as he saw it, and said,—
"She's afraid! I'm not afraid."
"Oh, no!" said the crazed woman, turning on him. "You're a man, Arty: men are not afraid,—you wanton, you wild one! Where's the groom?" said she again, addressing the Doctor, fiercely.
"My good woman," says the old gentleman, "we have come to offer you the consolations that are only to be found in the Gospel of Christ."