Newman returned to his bedside and begged him to be quiet.  “Be quiet and get well,” he said.  “That’s what you must do.  Get well and help me.”

“I told you you were in trouble!  How can I help you?” Valentin asked.

“I’ll let you know when you are better.  You were always curious; there is something to get well for!” Newman answered, with resolute animation.

Valentin closed his eyes and lay a long time without speaking.  He seemed even to have fallen asleep.  But at the end of half an hour he began to talk again.  “I am rather sorry about that place in the bank.  Who knows but what I might have become another Rothschild?  But I wasn’t meant for a banker; bankers are not so easy to kill.  Don’t you think I have been very easy to kill?  It’s not like a serious man.  It’s really very mortifying.  It’s like telling your hostess you must go, when you count upon her begging you to stay, and then finding she does no such thing.  ‘Really—­so soon?  You’ve only just come!’ Life doesn’t make me any such polite little speech.”

Newman for some time said nothing, but at last he broke out.  “It’s a bad case—­it’s a bad case—­it’s the worst case I ever met.  I don’t want to say anything unpleasant, but I can’t help it.  I’ve seen men dying before—­and I’ve seen men shot.  But it always seemed more natural; they were not so clever as you.  Damnation—­damnation!  You might have done something better than this.  It’s about the meanest winding-up of a man’s affairs that I can imagine!”

Valentin feebly waved his hand to and fro.  “Don’t insist—­don’t insist!  It is mean—­decidedly mean.  For you see at the bottom—­down at the bottom, in a little place as small as the end of a wine-funnel—­I agree with you!”

A few moments after this the doctor put his head through the half-opened door and, perceiving that Valentin was awake, came in and felt his pulse.  He shook his head and declared that he had talked too much—­ten times too much.  “Nonsense!” said Valentin; “a man sentenced to death can never talk too much.  Have you never read an account of an execution in a newspaper?  Don’t they always set a lot of people at the prisoner—­lawyers, reporters, priests—­to make him talk?  But it’s not Mr. Newman’s fault; he sits there as mum as a death’s-head.”

The doctor observed that it was time his patient’s wound should be dressed again; mm. de Grosjoyaux and Ledoux, who had already witnessed this delicate operation, taking Newman’s place as assistants.  Newman withdrew and learned from his fellow-watchers that they had received a telegram from Urbain de Bellegarde to the effect that their message had been delivered in the Rue de l’Universite too late to allow him to take the morning train, but that he would start with his mother in the evening.  Newman wandered away into the village again, and walked about restlessly for two or three hours.  The day seemed terribly long.  At dusk he came back and dined with the