‘Ah! M. Bouchereau is thirsting for my blood?’ Pelletier went on with a louder laugh; ‘up to now, I’d believed him herbivorous, rather than carnivorous. And with what sauce does he propose to eat me? with the sword or the pistol?’

‘He leaves you the choice of arms,’ said Dr Magnan, with an imperturbable seriousness.

‘It’s all the same to me, I’ve told him so already. Let’s see: to-morrow I’m lunching with some of my comrades; it’s a sort of corps dinner, and I’d be sorry to miss it; but I’m your man for the morning of the day after. Does that suit you?’

‘Perfectly. The day after to-morrow at seven o’clock in the morning at the entrance of the Vincennes wood.’

‘Agreed,’ said the captain, as he clapped his large hand familiarly on his companion’s arm. ‘Oho, doctor, you ’re taking a hand in a duel, then? All the same, that’s a rival that ought to inspire you with antipathy!’

The doctor replied to this superannuated joke by a malicious smile which he repressed at once.

‘You have just put your finger on one of my sore points in jest,’ he said after a moment’s silence. ‘Shall I confess to you an odd thought, I might say a monstrous thought, which strikes me at the moment?’

‘Tell me! I’m quite found of monstrous thoughts!’

‘I was saying to myself that, in the interests of my reputation, I would have cause for hoping that the meeting the day after to-morrow would have a fatal result for Bouchereau.’

‘Why that?’ demanded the officer in surprise.

‘I mean, that, if you do not kill him, before a year’s over, it is I who will pass for having killed him.’

‘I don’t understand. Do you want to fight with him as well?’

‘Not at all; but I am his doctor, and, as such, responsible for his existence in the eyes of many people, who require of the medical art that it preserve for its patients the health that nature has refused them. Now, as Bouchereau, according to all appearances, has only a year to live—’

‘What disease has he got, then?’ cried Pelletier, opening his big eyes.

‘Chest trouble!’ answered the doctor with a compassionate accent, ‘a chronic disease, without cure! I was going to send him to Nice. You know, we doctors, when we don’t know what else to prescribe our patients, send them to drink the waters, or to the south. If nothing happens to him the day after to- morrow, he ’ll go. Will he return? God knows!’

‘Chest trouble! a man who is always livid like Bouchereau!’

‘The colour has nothing to do with it.’

‘And you think him in danger?’

‘I do not give him a year to live, not six months, maybe.’

The two speakers walked on some time in silence, gravely.

‘Yes, captain,’ said the doctor, ‘you can look on poor Bouchereau as a lost man, even putting aside the danger that your sword is going to make him run. Quite certainly, before a year, his wife will be able to think of remarrying. That ’ll be a very seductive little widow, by Jove, and she won’t wait for adorers.’