“Look here, Jenkins, the duke is very ill.”

“I am afraid so,” said the Irishman, in a low voice.

“But what is the matter with him?”

“What he wanted, parbleu!” answered the other in a fury.  “One cannot be young at his age with impunity.  This intrigue will cost him dear.”

Some evil passion was getting the better of him but he subdued it immediately, and, puffing out his cheeks as though his head were full of water, he sighed deeply as he pressed the old nobleman’s hands.

“Poor duke! poor duke!  Ah, my friend, I am most unhappy!”

“Take care, Jenkins,” said Monpavon coldly, disengaging his hands, “you are assuming a terrible responsibility.  What! is the duke as bad as that?—­ps—­ps—­ps—­Will you see nobody?  You have arranged no consultation?”

The Irishman raised his hands as if to say, “What good can it do?”

The other insisted.  It was absolutely necessary that Brisset, Jousseline, Bouchereau, all the great physicians should be called in.

“But you will frighten him.”

De Monpavon expanded his chest, the one pride of the old broken-down charger.

“Mon Cher, if you had seen Mora and me in the trenches of Constantine—­ps—­ps.  Never looked away.  We don’t know fear.  Give notice to your colleagues.  I undertake to inform him.”

The consultation took place in the evening with great privacy, the duke having insisted on this from a singular sense of shame produced by his illness, by that suffering which discrowned him, making him the equal of other men.  Like those African kings who hide themselves in the recesses of their palaces to die, he would have wished that men should believe him carried off, transfigured, become a god.  Then, too, he dreaded above all things the expressions of pity, the condolences, the compassion with which he knew that his sick-bed would be surrounded; the tears because he suspected them to be hypocritical, and because, if sincere, they displeased him still more by their grimacing ugliness.

He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, everything that could move him to emotion or disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his life.  Every one knew this, and the order was to keep away from him the distress, the misery, which from one end of France to the other flowed towards Mora as to one of those forest refuges lighted during the night at which all wanderers may knock.  Not that he was hard to the unfortunate; perhaps he may have been too easily moved to the pity which he regarded as an inferior sentiment, a weakness unworthy of the strong, and, refusing it to others, he dreaded it for himself, for the integrity of his courage.  Nobody in the palace, then, except Monpavon and Louis the valet de chambre, knew of the visit of those three personages introduced mysteriously into the Minister of State’s apartments.  The duchess herself was ignorant of it.  Separated from her husband by the barriers