lty?" inquired the sick man.

There were a few hypocritical, stammered words of encouragement, vague
recommendations; then the three learned men hastily took their leave,
eager to be gone, to avoid any responsibility for the impending
disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained by the bedside,
overwhelmed by the brutal truths he had heard during the consultation.
In vain had he put his hand upon his heart, quoted his famous motto.
Bouchereau had not spared him. This was not the first of the Irishman's
patients whom he had seen fall suddenly to pieces thus; but he trusted
that Mora's death would be a salutary warning to people in society, and
that the prefect of police, as the result of this great calamity, would
send the "dealer in cantharides," to advertise his aphrodisiacs on the
other side of the Channel.

The duke realized that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the real
result of the consultation. He did not press them, therefore, but
submitted to their assumed confidence, even pretended to share it and to
believe all that they told him. But when Monpavon returned, he called
him to his bedside, and, undaunted by the falsehood that was visible
even under the paint of that wreck, he said:

"Oh! no wry faces, I beg. Between you and me, let us have the truth.
What do they say?--I am in a bad way, am I not?"

Monpavon prefaced his reply by a significant pause; then roughly,
cynically, for fear of showing emotion at the words:

"Damnation, my poor Auguste!"

The duke received it between the eyes without winking.

"Ah!" he said, simply.

He twisted his moustache mechanically; but his features did not change.
And in an instant his resolution was formed.

That the poor wretch who dies in the hospital, without home or kindred,
with no other name than the number of his bed, should accept death as a
deliverance or submit to it as a last trial, that the old peasant who
falls asleep, bent double, worn out and stiff-jointed, in his dark,
smoke-begrimed mole-hole, should go thence without regret, that he
should relish in anticipation the taste of the cool earth he has turned
and returned so many times, one can understand. And yet how many of them
are attached to existence by their very misery, how many exclaim as they
cling to their wretched furniture, to their rags: "I do not want to
die," and go with their nails broken and bleeding from that last wrench!
But there was nothing of the sort here.

To ha