"Very good! you have done wrong, Monsieur le Duc," said the Irishman bluntly, furious at his inability to discover anything.
But the next moment, realizing that he had gone too far, he tempered his ill-humor and the brutality of his diagnosis with a bolus of trite, axiomatic observations.—He must be careful. Medicine was not magic. The power of the Jenkins Pearls was limited by human strength, the necessities of advancing age, the resources of nature, which, unhappily, are not inexhaustible. The duke interrupted him nervously:
"Come, come, Jenkins, you know that I don't like fine phrases. They don't go with me. What is the matter with me? What is the cause of this coldness?"
"It's anæmia, exhaustion—a lowering of the oil in the lamp."
"What must I do?"
"Nothing. Absolute rest. Eat and sleep, nothing more. If you could go and pass a few weeks at Grandbois—"
Mora shrugged his shoulders.
"What about the Chamber, and the Council, and—Nonsense! as if it were possible!"
"At all events, Monsieur le Duc, you must put on the drag, as someone said, you must absolutely give up—"
Jenkins was interrupted by the entrance of the usher, who glided softly into the room on tiptoe, like a dancing-master, and handed a letter and a card to the minister who was still shivering in front of the fire. When he saw that envelope, of a satiny shade of gray, and of peculiar shape, the Irishman involuntarily started, while the duke, having opened his letter and glanced over it, rose to his feet full of animation, on his cheeks the faint flush of factitious health which all the heat from the fire had failed to bring to them.