"Have you dismissed M. de Courtomer then?" Laurent heard Aymar reply. "I have not succeeded in doing so."
"No, quite so," answered M. Perrelet in a very peculiar tone. "I am afraid he carries his fidelity too far."
Aymar's hand suddenly gripped the blanket.
"Tell me one thing," he said in a whisper which, nevertheless, Laurent heard well enough. "Was I . . . delirious . . . last night?"
"You had that—misfortune," replied the old surgeon, and stood looking down at him, his little gimlet eyes almost invisible under a frown. Then, as the young man in the bed flung his arm across his own eyes, M. Perrelet abruptly brushed away something—a fly perhaps—below his spectacles, and on that Laurent, very uncomfortable at having eavesdropped, came openly in.
"Ah, Monsieur de Courtomer," said the doctor, "I can leave my patient with every confidence in your hands now, for the time that you are here. He will not need me any more."
And Aymar said, in a strange, suffocated voice, "I have nothing to offer you, Monsieur Perrelet, in exchange for my life, but thanks, which are . . . equally worthless."
"They are good enough," returned M. Perrelet roughly, "for an old fool." And without another word he walked out of the bedroom.
Laurent, puzzled and embarrassed, followed him.
"M. de la Rocheterie is all right," said M. Perrelet in an unenthusiastic voice, his foot on the step of his gig. "There is no more danger of pulmonary trouble, though he has had the nearest escape from congestion of the lungs that I ever came across."