once so familiar. Yet he spoke French and English in a slow,
passive, involuntary way. All was automatic, mechanical.

The weeks again wore on, and autumn became winter, and then at last one
day the Cure came, bringing his brother, a great Parisian surgeon lately
arrived from France on a short visit. The Cure had told his brother the
story, and had been met by a keen, astonished interest in the unknown
man on Vadrome Mountain. A slight pressure on the brain from accident
had before now produced loss of memory--the great man's professional
curiosity was aroused: he saw a nice piece of surgical work ready to his
hand; he asked to be taken to Vadrome Mountain.

Now the Cure had lived long out of the world, and was not in touch with
the swift-minded action and adventuring intellects of such men as his
brother, Marcel Loisel. Was it not tempting Providence, a surgical
operation? He was so used to people getting ill and getting well without
a doctor--the nearest was twenty miles distant--or getting ill and dying
in what seemed a natural and preordained way, that to cut open a man's
head and look into his brain, and do this or that to his skull, seemed
almost sinful. Was it not better to wait and see if the poor man would
not recover in God's appointed time?

In answer to his sensitively eager and diverse questions, Marcel
Loisel replied that his dear Cure was merely mediaeval, and that he had
sacrificed his mental powers on the altar of a simple faith, which
might remove mountains but was of no value in a case like this, where,
clearly, surgery was the only providence.

At this the Cure got to his feet, came over, laid his hand on his
brother's shoulder, and said, with tears in his eyes:

"Marcel, you shock me. Indeed you shock me!"

Then he twisted a knot in his cassock cords, and added "Come then,
Marcel. We will go to him. And may God guide us aright!"

That afternoon the two grey-haired men visited Vadrome Mountain, and
there they found Charley at work in the little room that the two men had
built. Charley nodded pleasantly when the Cure introduced his brother,
but showed no further interest at first. He went on working at the
cupboard under his hand. His cap was off and his hair was a little
rumpled where the wound had been, for he had a habit of rubbing the
place now and then--an abstracted, sensitive motion--although he seemed
to suffer no pain. The surgeon's eyes fastened on the place, and as
Charley worked and