“Well!” said the good woman, “what I said I would do I will do. I will willingly help to cure you, and am well pleased to be able to relieve you of the terrible pain which torments you, and find you a place in which you can put your sore finger.”
“May God repay you, damsel,” said the monk. “I should never have dared to make the request, but since you are kind enough to help me, I shall not be the cause of my own death. Let us go then, if it please you, to some secret place where no one can see us.”
“It pleases me well,” she replied.
So she led him to a fair chamber, and closed the door, and laid upon the bed, and the monk lifted up her clothes, and instead of the finger of his hand, put something hard and stiff in the place. When he had entered, she feeling that it was very big, said,
“How is it that your finger is so swollen? I never heard of anything like it.”
“Truly,” he replied, “it is the disease which made it like that.”
“It is wonderful,” she said.
Whilst this talk was going on, master monk accomplished that for which he had played the invalid so long. She when she felt—et cetera—asked what that was, and he replied,
“It is the boil on my finger which has burst. I am cured I think—thank God and you.”
“On my word I am pleased to hear it,” said the woman as she rose from the bed. “If you are not quite cured, come back as often as you like;—for to remove your pain there is nothing I would not do. And another time do not be so modest when it is a question of recovering your health.”