"You are mistaken. I am far from feeble. Feebleness does not belong to my race. My strength does not forsake me readily; it will last while I last. Still you may inform your father's physician that I desire to see him."
"I will send him to you at once. You shall certainly see him to-day."
"Thank you."
These two words were spoken dryly by the countess, and with an emphasis which might have struck Maurice and caused him to suspect her intentions and possibly to frustrate them, had he not been so thoroughly convinced that her own state required medical care, and had he not known that her stoical fortitude made it easier for her to suffer than to admit that she could suffer.
Maurice found Madeleine where he had left her. The count had just awakened, much refreshed. He was softly stroking her head and saying with the same indistinct utterance, "Good angel! good angel!"
At the sight of Maurice the old troubled look passed again over his face, and he whispered hoarsely,—
"He shall never know. Never, never let him know. It would kill me! kill me!"
Maurice had told Madeleine how much better he had found his grandmother, and was giving her the gratifying intelligence that Madame de Gramont had said the cakes reminded her of Brittany (the highest praise possible for her to bestow on anything), when the doctor entered.
His patient, he said, had made marvellous progress; but that was owing, in a great measure, to admirable nursing; and he nodded approvingly to Madeleine.
"If physicians had only at their disposal a train of well-informed, efficient, conscientious nurses to distribute among their patients, medical services might be of some use in the world; but, as it is, we might make a new application of the old proverb, that God sends us dinners, and the devil sends us cooks who make the dinners valueless; a physician gives his orders and prescriptions, and a careless nurse renders them null."