memory of what was said to him from one day to the next. A hundred ways
Jo had tried to rouse his memory. But the words Cote Dorion had no
meaning to him, and he listened blankly to all names and phrases once so
familiar. Yet he spoke French and English in a slow, passive,
involuntary way. All was automatic, mechanical.

The weeks again wore on, and autumn became winter, and then at last one
day the Cure came, bringing his brother, a great Parisian surgeon lately
arrived from France on a short visit. The Cure had told his brother the
story, and had been met by a keen, astonished interest in the unknown man
on Vadrome Mountain. A slight pressure on the brain from accident had
before now produced loss of memory--the great man's professional
curiosity was aroused: he saw a nice piece of surgical work ready
to his hand; he asked to be taken to Vadrome Mountain.

Now the Cure had lived long out of the world, and was not in touch with
the swift-minded action and adventuring intellects of such men as his
brother, Marcel Loisel. Was it not tempting Providence, a surgical
operation? He was so used to people getting ill and getting well without
a doctor--the nearest was twenty miles distant--or getting ill and dying
in what seemed a natural and preordained way, that to cut open a man's
head and look into his brain, and do this or that to his skull, seemed
almost sinful. Was it not better to wait and see if the poor man would
not recover in God's appointed time?

In answer to his sensitively eager and diverse questions, Marcel Loisel
replied that his dear Cure was merely mediaeval, and that he had
sacrificed his mental powers on the altar of a simple faith, which might
remove mountains but was of no value in a case like this, where, clearly,
surgery was the only providence.