ridges.

"It is impossible," said the minister abruptly, rising from his chair.
"Take them away, Lartigues. You can come again, to-morrow. I can't
write, I am too cold. Just feel my hands, doctor, and tell me if you
would not say they were just out of a pail of iced water. My whole body
has been like that for two days. It's absurd enough in such weather!"

"It doesn't surprise me," growled the Irishman in a surly, short tone,
very unusual in that mellifluous voice.

The door had closed behind the young clerk, who carried away his
documents with a majestic stiffness of bearing, but was very happy, I
fancy, to feel that he was at liberty, and to have the opportunity,
before returning to the department, to saunter for an hour or two in
the Tuileries, overflowing at that hour with spring dresses and pretty
girls seated around the still unoccupied chairs of the musicians under
the flowering chestnut trees, which quivered from top to bottom with the
glad thrill of the month of nests. He was not frozen, not he.

Jenkins examined his patient without speaking, ausculted him, percussed
him, then, in the same rough tone, which might possibly be ascribed to
anxious affection, to the irritation of the physician who finds that his
instructions have been disregarded, he said:

"In God's name, my dear Duke, what sort of a life have you been leading
lately?"

He knew from ante-room gossips--the doctor did not despise them in the
households of those of his patients with whom he was on intimate
terms--he knew that the duke had a _new one_, that this caprice of
recent date had taken possession of him, excited him to an unusual
degree, and that information, added to other observations made in other
directions, had sown in Jenkins' mind a suspicion, a mad desire to know
the name of this _new one_. That is what he was trying to read on his
patient's pale brow, seeking the subject of his thoughts rather than the
cause of his illness. But he had to do with one of those faces peculiar
to men who are successful with women, faces as hermetically sealed as
the caskets with secret compartments which contain women's jewels and
letters,--one of those reticent natures locked with a cold, limpid
glance, a glance of steel against which the most perspicacious cunning
is powerless.

"You are mistaken, Doctor," replied His Excellency calmly, "I have not
changed my habits in any respect."

"Very good! you have done wrong, Monsieur le Duc," said the