“Eh, I stumble!” he cried with hollow merriment.  “I fall about and faint with fatigue!  Pah!  But it is nothing:  truly!”

“Fatigue!” I turned a bitter sneer upon him.  “Fatigue!  And you just out of bed!”

His fat hands went up palm outward; his heroic laughter was checked as with a sob; an expression of tragic incredulity shone from his eyes.  Patently he doubted the evidence of his own ears; could not believe that such black ingratitude existed in the world.  “Absalom, O my son Absalom!” was his unuttered cry.  His hands fell to his sides; his chin sank wretchedly into its own folds; his shirt-bosom heaved and crinkled; arrows of unspeakable injustice had entered the defenceless breast.

“Just out of bed!” he repeated, with a pathos that would have brought the judge of any court in France down from the bench to kiss him—­“And I had risen long, long before the dawn, in the cold and darkness of the night, to prepare the sandwiches of monsieur!”

It was too much for me, or rather, he was.  I stalked off to the woods in a state of helpless indignation; mentally swearing that his day of punishment at my hands was only deferred, not abandoned, yet secretly fearing that this very oath might live for no purpose but to convict me of perjury.  His talents were lost in the country; he should have sought his fortune in the metropolis.  And his manner, as he summoned me that evening to dinner, and indeed throughout the courses, partook of the subtle condescension and careless assurance of one who has but faintly enjoyed some too easy triumph.

I found this so irksome that I might have been goaded into an outbreak of impotent fury, had my attention not been distracted by the curious turn of the professor’s malady, which had renewed its painful assault upon him.  He came hobbling to table, leaning upon Saffren’s shoulder, and made no reference to his singular improvement of the night before—­ nor did I. His rheumatism was his own; he might do what he pleased with it!  There was no reason why he should confide the cause of its vagaries to me.

Table-talk ran its normal course; a great Pole’s philosophy receiving flagellation at the hands of our incorrigible optimist. ("If he could understand,” exclaimed Keredec, “that the individual must be immortal before it is born, ha! then this babbler might have writted some intelligence!”) On the surface everything was as usual with our trio, with nothing to show any turbulence of under-currents, unless it was a certain alertness in Oliver’s manner, a restrained excitement, and the questioning restlessness of his eyes as they sought mine from time to time.  Whatever he wished to ask me, he was given no opportunity, for the professor carried him off to work when our coffee was finished.  As they departed, the young man glanced back at me over his shoulder, with that same earnest look of interrogation, but it went unanswered by any token or gesture:  for though I guessed that he wished to know if Mrs. Harman had spoken of him to me, it seemed part of my bargain with her to give him no sign that I understood.