RenÉe gradually recovered and in a few months' time seemed to be quite well again. All the outward appearances of health came back to her, and she had no suffering at all. She did not even feel anything of the disturbance which illness leaves in the organs it has touched and in the life it has just attacked.

All at once the trouble began again. When she went upstairs or walked uphill she suddenly felt suffocated. Palpitation became more frequent and more violent, and then just as suddenly all this would stop again, as it happens sometimes with these insidious diseases which at intervals seem to entirely forget their victims.

At the end of a few weeks the doctor from Saint-Denis, who was attending RenÉe, took M. Mauperin aside.

"I don't feel satisfied about your daughter," he said. "There is something not quite clear to me. I should like to have a consultation with a specialist. These heart affections are very treacherous sometimes."

"Yes, these heart affections—you are quite right," stammered M. Mauperin.

He could not find anything else to say. His former notions of medicine, the desperate doctrines of the old school, Corvisart, the epigraph in his famous book on the subject of heart affections: "HÆret lateri lethalis arundo"; all these things came suddenly back to his mind, clearly and distinctly. He could see the pages again of those books so full of terror.

"You see," the doctor went on, "the great danger of these diseases is that they are so often of long standing. People send for us when the disease has made great headway. There are symptoms that the patient has not even noticed. Your daughter must have been very impressionable always, from her very childhood, I should say; isn't that so? Torrents of tears for the least blame, her face on fire for nothing at all, and then her pulse beating a hundred a minute, a constant state of emotion with her, very excitable, tempers like convulsions, always slightly feverish. She would put a certain amount of passion into everything, I should say, into her friendship, her games, her likes and dislikes; am I not right? Oh yes, this is generally the way with children in whom this organ predominates and who have an unfortunate predisposition to hypertrophy. Tell me now, has she lately had any great emotion—any great grief?"

"Yes, oh yes; her brother's death."

"Her brother's death. Ah yes, there was that," said the doctor, not appearing to attach any great importance, nevertheless, to this information. "I meant to ask you, though, whether she had been crossed in love, for instance."

"She? Crossed in love? Oh, good heavens!" and M. Mauperin shrugged his shoulders, and half joining his hands looked up in the air.

"Well, I'm only asking you that for the sake of having my conscience clear. Accidents of this kind only develop the germ that is already there and hasten on the disease. The physical influence of the passions on the heart is a theory—It has been studied a great deal the last twenty years; and quite right, too, in my opinion. The thesis that the heart is lacerated in a burst of temper, in any great moral——"

M. Mauperin interrupted him:

"Then, a consultation—you fancy—you think—don't you?"

"Yes, M. Mauperin, that will be quite the best thing. You see, it will be more satisfactory for every one; for you, and for me. We should call in M. Bouillaud, I suppose. He is considered the first authority."

"Yes—M. Bouillaud," repeated M. Mauperin, mechanically nodding his head in assent.