“What have you been doing to yourself?” he asked, then. “Are you sure you are quite well?”
She looked up from the logs she was piling dexterously together, surprised and smiling.
“Quite well? Of course I am! Never felt better! Do I look ill?”
Professor Chauvet got up and stretched his legs.
“Not ill,” he replied,—“No,—but feverish! Singularly so! Eyes too bright—lips too red,—spiteful women would say you had put belladonna in the one and carmine on the other! Let me feel your pulse!”
She laughed, and gave him her hand. He pressed his fingers on the cool, firm wrist.
“No—nothing the matter there!” he said, wrinkling his fuzzy brows in a puzzled line. “It is the pulse of youth and strong heart action. Well! What is it?”
“What is what?” queried Diana, merrily, as she settled the logs to her satisfaction, and kindled them into sparkling flame. “I know of nothing in myself that is, or isn’t!”
He smiled a wry smile.
“There you express the sum and substance of all philosophy!” he said. “Plato himself could go no further! All the same, there’s an IS about you that WASN’T! What do you make of that? And if you haven’t been doing anything to yourself what has our friend Féodor Dimitrius been doing to you?”