"—of the University of Salamanca: a Doctor, too. My memory is yet weak, but surely I had it from your own lips that you were a Doctor?"
"—of Moral Philosophy," the old man answered with another bow. "Of the College of the Conception—now, alas! destroyed."
"The care with which you have tended me, sir, has helped my mistake: and now my gratitude for it must help my apologies. I fear I have, from time to time, allowed my tongue to take many liberties with your profession."
"You have, to be sure, been somewhat hard with us."
"My prejudice is an honest one, sir."
"Of that there can be no possible doubt."
"But it must frequently have pained you."
"Not the least in the world," the old Doctor assured him, almost with bonhomie. "Besides, you were suffering from sunstroke."
My kinsman eyed him; and I could have laughed to watch it—that gaze betrayed a faint expiring hope that, after all, his diatribes against the Scarlet Woman had shaken the Doctor—upon whom (I need scarcely say) they had produced about as much effect as upon the rock of Rueda itself. And I think that, though regretfully, he must at length have realised this, for he sank back on the pillow again with a gentle weariness in every line of his Don Quixote face.
"Ah, yes, from sunstroke! My cousin"—here he turned towards me—"this gentleman—or, as I must now learn to call him, this most reverend Doctor of Philosophy, Gil Gonsalvez de Covadonga—found me some days ago stretched unconscious beside the highroad to Tordesillas, and in two ways has saved my life: first, by conveying me to this hiding-place, for the whole terrain was occupied by Marmont's troops, and I lay there in my scarlet tunic, a windfall for the first French patrol that might pass; and, secondly, by nursing me through delirium back to health of mind and strength of body."