odermic injections upon himself. He flew into a passion,
disowned his discovery, and called himself an imbecile. She too cried
out. It was she now who had faith in science, who grew indignant at
seeing him doubt his own genius. He resisted for a long time; then
yielding to the empire which she had acquired over him, he consented,
simply to avoid the affectionate dispute which she renewed with him
every morning. From the very first he experienced great relief from
the injections, although he refused to acknowledge it. His mind became
clearer, and he gradually gained strength. Then she was exultant, filled
with enthusiastic pride in him. She vaunted his treatment, and became
indignant because he did not admire himself, as an example of the
miracles which he was able to work. He smiled; he was now beginning to
see clearly into his own condition. Ramond had spoken truly, his illness
had been nothing but nervous exhaustion. Perhaps he would get over it
after all.

"Ah, it is you who are curing me, little girl," he would say, not
wishing to confess his hopes. "Medicines, you see, act according to the
hand that gives them."

The convalescence was slow, lasting through the whole of February. The
weather remained clear and cold; there was not a single day in which
the study was not flooded with warm, pale sunshine. There were hours
of relapse, however, hours of the blackest melancholy, in which all the
patient's terrors returned; when his guardian, disconsolate, was obliged
to sit at the other end of the room, in order not to irritate him still
more. He despaired anew of his recovery. He became again bitter and
aggressively ironical.

It was on one of those bad days that Pascal, approaching a window, saw
his neighbor, M. Bellombre, the retired professor, making the round of
his garden to see if his fruit trees were well covered with blossoms.
The sight of the old man, so neat and so erect, with the fine placidity
of the egoist, on whom illness had apparently never laid hold, suddenly
put Pascal beside himself.

"Ah!" he growled, "there is one who will never overwork himself, who
will never endanger his health by worrying!"

And he launched forth into an ironical eulogy on selfishness. To be
alone in the world, not to have a friend, to have neither wife nor
child, what happiness! That hard-hearted miser, who for forty years
had had only other people's children to cuff, who lived aloof from the
world, without even a dog, wit