’Sieur George, for the second time, was a changed man—changed from bad to worse; from being retired and reticent, he had come by reason of advancing years, or mayhap that which had left the terrible scar on his face, to be garrulous. When, once in a while, employment sought him (for he never sought employment), whatever remuneration he received went its way for something that left him dingy and threadbare. He now made a lively acquaintance with his landlord, as, indeed, with every soul in the neighbourhood, and told all his adventures in Mexican prisons and Cuban cities: including full details of the hardships and perils experienced jointly with the “long gentleman” who had married Mademoiselle, and who was no Mexican or Cuban, but a genuine Louisianian.

“It was he that fancied me,” he said, “not I him; but once he had fallen in love with me I hadn’t the force to cast him off. How Madame ever should have liked him was one of those woman’s freaks that a man mustn’t expect to understand. He was no more fit for her than rags are fit for a queen; and I could have choked his head off the night he hugged me round the neck and told me what a suicide she had committed. But other fine women are committing that same folly every day, only they don’t wait until they’re thirty- four or five to do it.—‘Why don’t I like him?’ Well, for one reason, he’s a drunkard!” Here Kookoo, whose imperfect knowledge of English prevented his intelligent reception of the story, would laugh as if the joke came in just at this point.

However, with all Monsieur’s prattle, he never dropped a word about the man he had been before he went away; and the great hair-trunk puzzle was still the same puzzle, growing greater every day.

Thus the two rooms had been the scene of some events quite queer, if not really strange; but the queerest that ever they presented, I guess, was ’Sieur George coming in there one day, crying like a little child, and bearing in his arms an infant—a girl—the lovely offspring of the drunkard whom he so detested, and poor; robbed, spirit-broken and now dead Madame. He took good care of the orphan, for orphan she was very soon. The long gentleman was pulled out of the Old Basin one morning, and ’Sieur George identified the body at the Trème station. He never hired a nurse— the father had sold the lady’s maid quite out of sight; so he brought her through all the little ills and around all the sharp corners of baby life and childhood, without a human hand to help him, until one evening, having persistently shut his eyes to it for weeks and months, like one trying to sleep in the sunshine, he awoke to the realisation that she was a woman. It was a smoky one in November, the first cool day of autumn. The sunset was dimmed by the smoke of burning prairies, the air was full of the ashes of grass and reeds, ragged urchins were lugging home sticks of cordwood, and when a bit of coal fell from a cart in front of Kookoo’s old house, a child was boxed half across the street and robbed of the booty by a blanchisseuse de fin from over the way.

The old man came home quite steady. He mounted the stairs smartly without stopping to rest, went with a step unusually light and quiet to his chamber, and sat by the window opening npon the rusty balcony.

It was a small room, sadly changed from what it had been in old times; but then so was ’Sieur George. Close and dark it was, the walls stained with dampness and the ceiling full of bald places that showed the lathing. The furniture was cheap and meagre, including conspicuously the small, curious-looking hair-trunk. The floor was of white slabs fastened down with spikes, and sloping up and down in one or two broad undulations, as if they had drifted far enough down the current of time to feel the tide-swell.

However, the floor was clean, the bed well made, the cypress table in place, and the musty smell of the walls partly neutralised by a geranium on the window-sill.

He so coming in and sitting down, an unseen person called from the room adjoining (of which, also, he was still the rentee) to know if he were he, and being answered in the affirmative, said, “Papa George, guess who was here to-day?”

“Kookoo, for the rent?”

“Yes, but he will not come back.”