"What did you mean me to come for, then, since you will not let me give evidence now that I am here?"
Aymar made no reply in words; he merely pressed his hand. And a few minutes later, sheer fatigue overriding the nervous tension, he was sleeping like a child. But, in spite of his own brave words, Laurent's heart ached as he sat beside him and thought of the morrow. . . . And to-day? In some ways Aymar had got through better than he probably looked for—in the matter of keeping out Mme de Villecresne's name, for instance. On the other hand, they neither of them anticipated that the Court would want to burrow so deeply into that intensely painful episode of the shooting. Oh, what would be the outcome of the whole business—what, indeed, would an impartial observer have said was the real outcome of to-day's proceedings?
But in Mme Leblanc's little sitting-room no such person existed; there was only one very anxious young man watching another.
More than half an hour had passed thus when there came a knock at the door, and Laurent, tiptoeing over, was presented by Mme Leblanc with a large visiting card, and the information that there was "a gentleman downstairs asking to see M. de la Rocheterie."
Laurent gave an exclamation. "What is it?" asked Aymar, rousing.
"You would never guess!" cried Laurent in high glee. "Our dear Père Perrelet, come, I am sure, to make amends, though dropped from Heaven knows where, and on your track Heaven knows how! You'll see him, Aymar, of course?"
And, pelting down the narrow stairs, he almost fell into the arms of M. le docteur J.-M.-P. Perrelet, in all his Sunday clothes, at the bottom. Indeed M. le docteur soundly embraced him.
"Oh, my dear boy, how is he after this morning? I was there—you didn't see me? I managed to get in—I—as a military doctor! I heard of this by chance at Arbelles two days ago . . . so I knew that I should find him here. And now I've listened to it all . . . mon Dieu, what a story! What a brute and fool I was! Will he see me? I want to ask his pardon. Do you think he will give it me? Or perhaps he never realized that——"
"Oh, did he not!" returned Laurent. "But he owes you far too much to refuse it . . . and in any case . . . Go up; there's the door."
And he watched the little doctor mount the stairs, already taking out his pocket-handkerchief, heard him open the door, and say in husky tones, "My dearest boy, can you ever——" Then the door shut.