"Exactly," corroborated the French minister.
"And, doctor," added Todd, in a slightly embarrassed tone, "it is a mess. We can't explain. Mum's the word, you know."
"Oh, I knew before you told me," said the young doctor. Then he went to work.
An hour later Pierre, gasping, and pouring out from his entire frame the very sap of vitality, still lay on the sofa, his fever gone, his mind clear, uplifted, pellucid, as it had been on awakening in Yuki's tea-rooms three hours before.
The doctor had departed. Neither Todd nor the French minister had left the room. The two politicians tacitly understood that neither trusted the other, yet, strange to say, neither resented it. The issue at stake was too big for personal irritation. In the reaction of his excitement Todd pondered anew, with ever deepening foreboding, upon the thing that Yuki's eyes had told him. Ronsard, overflowing in his cushioned chair, brooded of France and her already humiliated ally, Russia.
"Le Beau," said Todd, at length, rising and walking in the direction of the sofa, "you're too sick a man to be pounded by all the arguments I have been getting together for you, but there are just a few things I must say, and which his Excellency Count Ronsard here should hear me say."
"Speak," said Pierre, languidly; "it will make no difference at all, Monsieur, but I shall listen."
"I want you to return that paper quietly, as a gentleman should, and I want you to go back to the hospital, as a rational being should. You are precipitating a crisis that Napoleon in his best days might shrink from, and you are too ill to stand on your feet. You don't know yet what you are doing. Rely on stronger men, just now, and in all your future life you will thank God that you listened!"
Pierre shifted his position slightly and tried to smile. Ronsard placed himself at the other end of the couch. His eyes held Todd. "Before Pierre tries to answer, it is but right to him, to France, that I should speak, your Excellency." He went close to Pierre and touched him. "Pierre, I urge, with all the fervor, all the loyalty, all the passion of a son of France, that you give up—not the paper; that is ours,—but the woman. None but a coward and a sensualist would sell away from his country a paper which commands so terrible a price."
"I am impaled upon the diameter of widely differing opinions," said Pierre, sarcastically.