'No questions, if you please. Remember, people who are picked up wounded and insensible are "cases."'
'Ah, that isn't so very inhuman!' she said, after gulping down the dose. 'It takes the breath away, but then it seems to bring back one's soul.'
'I am sorry to say that the noble art of healing does not invent such remedies. We cannot say, like the Bishop of Noyou, that this recipe came out of our own heads.'
'And who was the Bishop of Noyou?'
'A worthy ecclesiastic who used to say at the close of his sermons, "My brethren, I took none of these truths which I have just uttered from the Scriptures or from the Fathers—all came out of the head of your bishop." That was not a pharmacop[oe]ian drug you swallowed; it was brandy and water.'
'Dr. Johnson's beverage for heroes! Well, I felt heroic impulses the moment I drank it—no less than a resolve to mount Orlando. 'Oh, you unfaithful creature!' she said, looking reproachfully at the horse.
'Nonsense, you must submit to be driven home in my buggy, and I really must wash that wound on your temple.'
'A wound!' cried Stella, with incredulous amazement.
'Yes; was it the blow of a stray branch that threw you off the horse, or was it the fall that made you insensible?'
'Oh, I was not——' she stopped abruptly.