Genestas came into a little yard, which was sufficiently clean and tidily kept, and saw before him a lad of fifteen, who looked as delicate as a woman.  His hair was fair but scanty, and the color in his face was so bright that it seemed hardly natural.  He rose up slowly from the bench where he was sitting, beneath a thick bush of jessamine and some blossoming lilacs that were running riot, so that he was almost hidden among the leaves.

“You know very well,” said the doctor, “that I told you not to talk, not to expose yourself to the chilly evening air, and to go to bed as soon as the sun was set.  What put it into your head to sing?”

“Dame! M. Benassis, it was so very warm out here, and it is so nice to feel warm!  I am always cold.  I felt so happy that without thinking I began to try over Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre, just for fun, and then I began to listen to myself because my voice was something like the sound of the flute your shepherd plays.”

“Well, my poor Jacques, this must not happen again; do you hear?  Let me have your hand,” and the doctor felt his pulse.

The boy’s eyes had their usual sweet expression, but just now they shone with a feverish light.

“It is just as I thought, you are covered with perspiration,” said Benassis.  “Your mother has not come in yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Come! go in-doors and get into bed.”

The young invalid went back into the cottage, followed by Benassis and the officer.

“Just light a candle, Captain Bluteau,” said the doctor, who was helping Jacques to take off his rough, tattered clothing.

When Genestas had struck a light, and the interior of the room was visible, he was surprised by the extreme thinness of the child, who seemed to be little more than skin and bone.  When the little peasant had been put to bed, Benassis tapped the lad’s chest, and listened to the ominous sounds made in this way by his fingers; then, after some deliberation, he drew back the coverlet over Jacques, stepped back a few paces, folded his arms across his chest, and closely scrutinized his patient.

“How do you feel, my little man?”

“Quite comfortable, sir.”

A table, with four spindle legs, stood in the room; the doctor drew it up to the bed, found a tumbler and a phial on the mantel-shelf, and composed a draught, by carefully measuring a few drops of brown liquid from the phial into some water, Genestas holding the light the while.

“Your mother is very late.”

“She is coming, sir,” said the child; “I can hear her footsteps on the path.”

The doctor and the officer looked around them while they waited.  At the foot of the bed there was a sort of mattress made of moss, on which, doubtless, the mother was wont to sleep in her clothes, for there were neither sheets nor coverlet.  Genestas pointed out this bed to Benassis, who nodded slightly to show that he likewise had already admired this motherly devotion.  There was a clatter of sabots in the yard, and the doctor went out.