"Good day, Mlle. Clotilde."

"Good day, M. Ramond."

During a gastric fever, happily mild, which the young girl had had the
preceding year, Dr. Pascal had lost his head to the extent of
distrusting his own skill, and he had asked his young colleague to
assist him--to reassure him. Thus it was that an intimacy, a sort of
comradeship, had sprung up among the three.

"You shall have your notes to-morrow, I promise you," she said,
smiling.

Ramond walked on with them, however, until they reached the end of the
Rue de la Banne, at the entrance of the old quarter whither they were
going. And there was in the manner in which he leaned, smiling, toward
Clotilde, the revelation of a secret love that had grown slowly,
awaiting patiently the hour fixed for the most reasonable of
_denouements_. Besides, he listened with deference to Dr. Pascal,
whose works he admired greatly.

"And it just happens, my dear friend, that I am going to Guiraude's,
that woman, you know, whose husband, a tanner, died of consumption
five years ago. She has two children living--Sophie, a girl now going
on sixteen, whom I fortunately succeeded in having sent four years
before her father's death to a neighboring village, to one of her
aunts; and a son, Valentin, who has just completed his twenty-first
year, and whom his mother insisted on keeping with her through a blind
affection, notwithstanding that I warned her of the dreadful results
that might ensue. Well, see if I am right in asserting that