had asked his young colleague to
assist him--to reassure him. Thus it was that an intimacy, a sort of
comradeship, had sprung up among the three.

"You shall have your notes to-morrow, I promise you," she said, smiling.

Ramond walked on with them, however, until they reached the end of the
Rue de la Banne, at the entrance of the old quarter whither they were
going. And there was in the manner in which he leaned, smiling, toward
Clotilde, the revelation of a secret love that had grown slowly,
awaiting patiently the hour fixed for the most reasonable of
_denouements_. Besides, he listened with deference to Dr. Pascal, whose
works he admired greatly.

"And it just happens, my dear friend, that I am going to Guiraude's,
that woman, you know, whose husband, a tanner, died of consumption five
years ago. She has two children living--Sophie, a girl now going on
sixteen, whom I fortunately succeeded in having sent four years before
her father's death to a neighboring village, to one of her aunts; and
a son, Valentin, who has just completed his twenty-first year, and
whom his mother insisted on keeping with her through a blind affection,
notwithstanding that I warned her of the dreadful results that might
ensue. Well, see if I am right in asserting that consumption is not
hereditary, but only that consumptive parents transmit to their children
a degenerate soil, in which the disease develops at the slightest
contagion. Now, Valentin, who lived in daily contact with his father,
is consumptive, while Sophie, who grew up in the open air, has superb
health."

He added with a triumphant smile:

"But that will not prevent me, perhaps, from saving Valentin, for he
is visibly improved, and is growing fat since I have used my injections
with him. Ah, Ramond, you will come to them yet; you will come to my
injections!"

The young physician shook hands with both of them, saying:

"I don't say no. You know that I am always with you."

When they were alone they quickened their steps and were soon in the Rue
Canquoin, one of the narrowest and darkest streets of the old quarter.
Hot as was the sun, there reigned here the semi-obscurity and the
coolness of a cave. Here it was, on a ground floor, that Guiraude lived
with her son Valentin. She opened the door herself. She was a thin,
wasted-looking woman, who was herself affected with a slow decomposition
of the blood. From morning till night she crushed almonds with the end
of an ox-bon