Long after midnight Chester had not returned to his room. He could not tolerate the confinement¹ even of the narrow streets round about it.  
Far out Esplanade Avenue, uncompanioned, he was walking mile after mile beside a belt line of trolley-cars, or more than one, while at home, in Bourbon Street, Cupid slept.
 
But now the child awoke, startled. Four small feet were on one of his arms, and Marie Madeleine was purring, at the top of her purr, in his ear. Drowsily² he crowded her away. Purring on, she slowly walked across his stomach and dropped to the floor. But soon she leaped up again to that sensitive region and purred into his nose, not at all as if to claim attention, but as though lost in thought. When he pushed her aside she dropped again to the floor, with such a quadruple thump³ that he looked after her, and as she loitered across his view with tail as straight up as Cleopatra's Needle, he observed just beyond her a condition of affairs that appalled⁴ him.
 
Cold from his small fingers and toes to his ample heart, he rose, stole into the next room, and stood by the bed where lay Mlles. Corinne and Yvonne as they had lain every night since their earliest childhood.
 
"Ah! oh! h'nn!" Mlle. Corinne sprang to an elbow, nervously⁵ whispering: "What is it?"
 
"My back do'," he murmured, "stan'in' opem."
 
"Oh, little boy, no, it cannot be! I bolt' it laz' evening when you was praying. You know?"
 
"Yass'm, but it opem now; Marie Madeleine dess gone out thu it."
 
Mlle. Yvonne sprang up dishevelled beside her dishevelled sister: "Mon dieu! where is Aline?"
 
Colder than ever in hands and feet, the wee grandson of the intrepid⁶ Sidney responded: "Stay still tell I go see."
 
"Yes!" whispered Mlle. Corinne, slipping to the floor and tenderly pushing him, "go! safest for everybody! And if you see a burglar don' threaten him!"
 
"No'm, I won't."
 
"No, but juz' run quick out the back door and fron' gate and holla 'fire'! Go!"
 
At the crack of the door she listened after him w............