"By Heaven! thou hast saved my life. Hallo! thou art bleeding. Here!" and he tied a handkerchief about his shoulder. "We shall be in luck to find a chaise. Wait!" and he ran away.
François's head was dizzy. He sat on a tombstone, well sobered now, but bleeding freely. It was long before he heard a horse; and when in the chaise, where Toto promptly followed him, he fell back, and knew little more until they stopped in the Rue St. Honoré. Here his new acquaintance got out, and soon returned with a glass of eau-de-vie. With this aid, and the arm of his host, François was able to reach a large room in the second story. He fell on a couch, and lay still while the other man ran out to find a surgeon.
On his arrival, François was put to bed in an adjoining room, and for two weeks of care and good diet had leave to meditate on the changeful chances of this wretched world. For a while he was too weak to indulge his customary keenness of curiosity. His host, M. Achille Gamel, paid him brief visits, and was singularly unwilling to talk one day, and the next sufficiently so for the patient to learn that he had been in the army as a maître d'armes, and was now, in his own opinion, the best fencing-master in France. Through the partitions could be heard the click, click of the foils, and now and then the crack of pistols. After a fortnight François's wounds were fairly healed, and he began to get back his rosy complexion and his unfailing curiosity.
One pleasant evening in June, Gamel appeared as usual. It was one of his days of abrupt speech.
"Art well?"
"Yes."
"Thou art soon mended."
"Yes." His brevity begot a like form of answer, and François was now somewhat on his guard.
"I pay my debts."
"That is true."