They both smiled more good-naturedly.
"Exclusively."
"She's a coon;" and the little doctor rose up and crawled away, ostensibly to see another friend, but really to drag himself into his bedchamber and lock himself in. The next day--the yellow fever was bad again--he resumed the practice of his profession.
"'Twill be a sort of decent suicide without the element of pusillanimity," he thought to himself.
CHAPTER LII
LOVE LIES A-BLEEDING
When Honoré Grandissime heard that Doctor Keene had returned to the city in a very feeble state of health, he rose at once from the desk where he was sitting and went to see him; but it was on that morning when the doctor was sitting and talking with Joseph, and Honoré found his chamber door locked. Doctor Keene called twice, within the following two days, upon Honoré at his counting-room; but on both occasions Honoré's chair was empty. So it was several days before they met. But one hot morning in the latter part of August,--the August days were hotter before the cypress forest was cut down between the city and the lake than they are now,--as Doctor Keene stood in the middle of his room breathing distressedly after a sad fit of coughing, and looking toward one of his windows whose closed sash he longed to see opened, Honoré knocked at the door.
"Well, come in!" said the fretful invalid. "Why, Honoré,--well, it serves you right for stopping to knock. Sit down."
Each took a hasty, scrutinizing glance at the other; and, after a pause, Doctor Keene said: