“Your profession,” asked Stranleigh, with evident astonishment.
“Yes; can’t you guess what it is, and why I am relating this bit of personal history on such very short acquaintance?”
The girl’s smile was beautiful.
“Don’t you know Europe?” she added.
“I ought to; I’m a native.”
“Then you are aware that Lausanne is a centre of medical teaching and medical practice. I am a doctor, Mr. Stranleigh. Had your wound been really serious, which it is not, and you had come under the care of either physician in Bleachers, he would have sent for me, if he knew I were at home.”
“What you have said interests me very much, Miss Armstrong, or should I say Doctor Armstrong?”
“I will answer to either designation, Mr. Stranleigh, but I should qualify the latter by adding that I am not a practising physician. ‘Professor,’ perhaps, would be the more accurate title. I am a member of the faculty in an eastern college of medicine, but by and by I hope to give up teaching, and devote myself entirely to research work. It is my ambition to become the American Madame Curie.”
“A laudable ambition, Professor, and I hope you will succeed. Do you mind if I tell you how completely wrong you are in your diagnosis of the subject now before you?”
“In my surgical diagnosis I am not wrong. Your wound will be cured in a very few days.”