Help me, Rose! she is going
to faint; her lips are white."
Dr. Aubertin and Rose brought a chair. They forced Josephine into it.
She was not the least faint; yet her body obeyed their hands just like
a dead body. The baroness melted into tears; tears streamed from Rose's
eyes. Josephine's were dry and stony, and fixed on coming horror. The
baroness looked at her with anxiety. "Thoughtless old woman! It was
too sudden; it is too much for my dear child; too much for me," and she
kneeled, and laid her aged head on her daughter's bosom, saying feebly
through her tears, "too much joy, too much joy!"
Josephine took no notice of her. She sat like one turned to stone
looking far away over her mother's head with rigid eyes fixed on the air
and on coming horrors.
Rose felt her arm seized. It was Aubertin. He too was pale now, though
not before. He spoke in a terrible whisper to Rose, his eye fixed on the
woman of stone that sat there.
"IS THIS JOY?"
Rose, by a mighty effort, raised her eyes and confronted his full. "What
else should it be?" said she.
And with these words this Spartan girl was her sister's champion once
more against all comers, friend or foe.
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