“How long must I be here?” inquired he, after Cornelia was gone.

“Three months at least,” replied the surgeon; “more if you worry yourself about it.”

“Three months!” repeated the young man, aghast.  “What’s to become of my studies?  I can’t hold a book; I can’t write; I had to have my breakfast fed to me this morning,” continued he, biting his mustache and looking away.  The professor smiled thoughtfully.

“I have hopes,” said he, “that you’ll know more about Divinity when you come out of this room than you did before you went into it.  We’ll see when the time comes.”

“I’ve found out already that my bones are like other men’s,” remarked Bressant, with a sigh.

“So much the better,” returned the old man.  “You never would have learned that out of your Hebrew Lexicon.  The best way to reach this young fellow’s soul is through his body,” declared he, silently, to the bandage he was preparing for the broken head.  “This is nothing but a blessing in disguise.”  But he had too much tact to carry the conversation further, and presently left his patient alone to digest his breakfast and the lesson it had inculcated.

This was Cornelia’s last day at home; she was to take the eight-o’clock train next morning to the city.  The young lady’s mood was unequal:  sometimes she drooped; anon would break forth into much talk and merriment, which would evaporate almost as quickly as the froth of champagne.  This was her first departure from home, and the ease, freedom, and beloved old ways of home-life, assumed more of their true value in her eyes.  She had acquired a sentiment of awe for Aunt Margaret’s grandeur.  She would be obliged to sleep in corsets and high-heeled shoes; everybody would be going through the figures of a stately minuet all day long.

Then she began to feel in advance the wrench of separating from those with whom her life had been spent, and from one other in whose company she had lived more—­so it seemed to her—­than in all the years since she ceased to be a child.  Bressant was very prominent in her thoughts; nor could she be blamed for this, for the short acquaintance bad been emphasized by a disproportional number of memorable events:  First, there was the thunder-storm evening by the fountain; afterward, the dance at Abbie’s; and, following in quick succession, the celestial arch, the walk homeward, and the catastrophe in which he had borne the chief part.  Besides, he was so different from common men.

“So perfectly natural and unaffected,” she argued to herself.  “He means all he says; of course I shouldn’t let him say such things to me as he does if it weren’t so; but it would be affectation in me to object to it as it is!”—­a most plausible deduction, by-the-way, but dangerous to act upon.  To persuade herself that, because he was an exceptional sort of person, his plain way of talking to her was justifiable, was to establish a secret understanding between him and herself, which placed her at a disadvantage to begin with; and unreservedly to accept compliments, even ingenuous ones, was to indulge in a luxury that must ultimately render callous her moral sensitiveness and refinement.