"I am come to make my thanks to you, sir," he said, "for your kind offices this afternoon in replying to my name for the roll call."
"Do not mention it," I replied, bidding him be seated; "you came to class then after all?"
"Yes. Soon after the rest they are gone, I advance to the fine old professor to explain my lateness. He informs me I am not tardy."
"You didn't give the snap away?" I cried, realizing more fully the chances I had taken, for, if this foreigner were of the stripe of human beings who would rather be right than President, I should be made to suffer for my kindness. My classmates would never forgive me for breaking up the little deception which other classes had practised undetected for years.
"Snap?" he repeated, puzzled by the colloquialism.
"I mean you did not tell him some one answered to your name?"
"Oh, no, I did not; although it is peculiar to be told by inference that one lies. When the instructor he says you are here since the beginning of the hour, and shows me the mark on the roll beside my name I only thank him and say 'Ah.'"
"Good boy," I cried, knowing that our secret was safe in his hands; and I took him to my heart then and there.
In five minutes we were smoking our pipes in the easy chairs, engaged in the pleasant occupation of getting acquainted. I told him all about myself and learned that he was not a Frenchman nor yet a Russian. That much he told me, and a great deal more, but he did not volunteer any information as to his nationality. There was that about him, too, which discouraged familiarity and he remained a man of mystery, even to me with whom he came to dwell at the end of that week, and with whom he continued to live for eight years. After we passed through college, I persuaded him to study medicine, and we both graduated from the medical school at the age of twenty-five.
He was one of the most remarkable linguists I have ever met, and with good cause. From his own account, he was sent away from home by his father for political reasons, the import of which he himself did not know, when he was eleven years old. He spent two years in St. Petersburg at school, two in Berlin and one in Paris before he came to Philadelphia, and, as far as I could learn, had never been home in all that time. His ample quarterly remittances came through a Paris broker's office.