'Come along, Pauline,' she said, quite unconcernedly. 'You see that your uncle can't endure to have any of us near him.'

But Pauline stayed behind in the sick-room. She glided about with such a light step that her feet scarcely seemed to touch the floor. From that moment she installed herself there as the sick man's nurse, and she was the only person whose presence in the room he could endure. She seemed able to read his thoughts, and she anticipated all his wants, softening the light as occasion seemed to require, and giving him his gruel, which Véronique brought as far as the door. But what the poor man found especially soothing and comforting was to see her constantly before him, sitting thoughtfully and quietly on her chair, with her big sympathetic eyes ever fixed upon him. He tried to find some distraction from his weariness in telling her of his sufferings.

'Just now I feel as if someone were sawing away at the joints of my toes with a jagged knife, and at the same time I could almost swear that I was being drenched with warm water.'

Then the character of his agony changed. It seemed as though a steel wire were twisted tightly round his ankle, and he could feel his muscles being strained till they were on the point of breaking. Pauline listened with affectionate complaisance and seemed to fully understand all he told her, remaining ever placid amongst all his groanings, with no other thought than to do what she could to alleviate his pain. She even forced herself to appear gay, and actually succeeded in making him laugh between his paroxysms.

When Doctor Cazenove at last arrived, he was filled with admiration of the little nurse, and gave her a hearty kiss upon her head. The Doctor was a man of fifty-four, vigorous and lean, who, after thirty years' service in the navy, had just settled down at Arromanches, where an uncle had left him a house. He had been a friend of the Chanteaus ever since he had cured Madame Chanteau of an awkward sprain.

'Well! well! here I am again!' he said. 'I have just come in to shake hands; but, you know, I can do nothing more for you than the little girl is already doing. When one has inherited gout, and has got past one's fiftieth year, one must reconcile oneself to it. And then, you know, you ruined your constitution with the shopful of drugs you swallowed. The only remedies are patience and flannel!'

The Doctor affected utter scepticism of the power of medicine in such a case. In thirty years he had seen so many poor sufferers racked with pain and disease, in all sorts of climates and in all kinds of surroundings, that he had grown very modest about his power to afford any actual relief. He generally preferred to let Nature work out its own cure. However, he carefully examined Chanteau's swollen toe, whose gleaming skin had turned a deep red, went on to look at the knee which was threatened with inflammation, and finally took note of the presence of a little pearl-like deposit, white and hard, at the edge of the patient's right ear.

'But, Doctor,' groaned the sufferer, 'you are not going to leave me suffering like this?'

Cazenove's demeanour had become quite serious. That chalky bead interested him, and his faith in medical science returned at the sight of this new symptom. 'Dear me' he murmured half to himself, 'I had better try what salts and alkalies will do. It is evidently becoming chronic.'

Then in a louder and angry tone he said: 'It is your own fault, you know. You won't follow the directions I have given you. You are always glued to your arm-chair, and you never think of taking any exercise. And then I dare say you have been drinking wine and eating too much meat. Eh! haven't you, now? Confess that you have been taking something heating!'