“You will put him all right before long?” returned the merchant, alarmed at the gravity of the physician’s manner.
“All these things lie on the knees of the gods,” said Demoleon, quoting from his favorite Homer. (It was a maxim of his that a man who did not know his Homer was little better than a fool.) It may be said that the physician was more than a little brusque in manner and speech. Twenty years of solitary life had made him so, for since his wife’s death he had held aloof from all the social life of the place.
“What ails him?” enquired the merchant.
“A fever,” was the brief reply.
“Does it run high?”
“Very high indeed.”
“You have bled him, of course.”
The physician’s answers to enquiries were generally as short as the rules of politeness permitted; occasionally, some of his questioners were disposed to think, even shorter; but there were remarks that always made him fluent of speech, though the fluency was not always agreeable to his audience.
“Bleed him, sir,” he cried, “why don’t you say at once stab him, poison him? No, sir, I have not bled him, and do not intend to.”
“I thought that it was usual in such cases,” said the merchant timidly.