‘TIENS!’ said old Monsieur Croite, the family doctor and trusted friend of the Choisigny family, who had been hastily summoned from Dinard, and who stood looking down at his little patient, with Mr Maxwell and the Vicomte at his elbow. ‘At the first there has been a chill, a most severe one, and that has brought on a slight attack of rheumatic fever. Not bad, that is to say, but still it is there. And on the top of that, as it were, there are signs of irritability of the brain. That may arise from one thing, or it may arise from another. The lad may have been ill-treated, or he may have been frightened, which after all is but another form of ill-treatment, or he may be of weak intellect. That I cannot say for certain, but I suspect much. See!’ And laying his hand on Pierre’s little closely cropped head, he parted the hair just above the right ear, and showed an ugly scar which looked as if it were only newly healed.

‘I do not know,’ he repeated; ‘but I suspect that the boy has had a blow, and that the skull has been fractured, not badly, but a little, and that the skull presses on the brain. I am no surgeon; I leave that to those who are more skilful in that branch of our profession than I am. But by your leave, Monsieur the Vicomte, I will return to-morrow with my son; he, as you know, has just returned from work in the hospitals of Vienna and Paris. He has had the experience. He shall tell us what he thinks.’

So next morning Dr Croite brought his tall, grave son with him to the chÂteau, and together they made a careful examination of the unconscious child.

‘It is as my father says, monsieur,’ said Dr Jules gravely, when the patient had been left in Suzette’s hands, and all four gentlemen had assembled downstairs in the Vicomte’s private room. ‘The boy has had an injury to his head, inflicted by some one, I should say, rather than by a fall. It must have occurred within the last six months, the condition of the wound tells me that, and there is something—a tiny splinter of bone mayhap—which presses on the brain. Had this been all, I would have operated at once, and removed the cause of the pressure, whatever it may be. Such operations are dangerous, but in a large hospital they are done every day. But in the boys present condition I dare not attempt it; it would mean certain failure. If with careful nursing you can subdue the fever, and maintain his strength, which I very much doubt, for he is very weak, poor little one! then in three weeks or a month it might be attempted.’

‘If Monsieur the Vicomte desires it, I can have him removed to the little hospital at Dinard,’ broke in the old doctor. ‘Such nursing as this must be puts a household to great inconvenience, and the good Sisters at the hospital are very kind.’

‘The boy is very weak,’ remarked his son suggestively; ‘he has suffered great hardships.’

‘Eh, what?’ said the Vicomte, suddenly recognising the drift of the conversation. ‘But he cannot be removed from here. Old Suzette is a splendid nurse. She nursed me through all my childhood’s ailments; and these were not few, as you, Monsieur Croite, know. And if there has to be any operation, Monsieur Jules, you must just bring one of the good Sisters up from the hospital to help you. It shall never be said that Arnauld de Choisigny turned any sick thing, even if it be only a poor wandering child, from his house.’

‘I was not suggesting that, monsieur,’ said Dr Jules humbly; ‘but the case is very critical. The child may die, to put it plainly, and it will cause you a great deal of trouble. He must be watched night and day if he has to have a chance.’

‘I will watch him,’ said Mr Maxwell, ‘and the Vicomte and old Suzette will help me. If, as I suspect,’ he went on, with flashing eyes, ‘the child is really English, then there has been grave wickedness done somewhere; but, please God, we will pull him through and put it right.’

Faithfully did the three Good Samaritans into whose hands Pierre had fallen carry out their self-imposed task.

To Mr Maxwell, whose life had been one long fight against sin, with its accompaniments disease and death, it was simply a piece of the day’s work, a duty that had fallen to his hands, an opportunity for service; and had it not been for the Vicomte, who insisted that he should go out for a daily walk, and have his proper hours for sleep, he would have spent every minute in the sick-room, watching beside the unconscious boy, as he had often watched beside the bed of some little street arab in some wretched den in the slums of his city parish.

When, to please his friend, he would go out for a walk up and down the terrace, or go down to the little landing-stage for a row on the river, the Vicomte was always ready to take his place, or old Suzette, who was a born nurse, and who sat up all night and was quite ready to sit up all day too if need be. Indeed, they let her be beside Pierre as much as possible, for when she talked to him and soothed him in her homely patois he seemed quieter and less excited than when Mr Maxwell was by his bedside. One would have thought then that he knew that he was in the presence of an Englishman, for he would stop his low rambling Breton talk and turn to English phrases, and grow so hot and eager that the good clergyman had often to slip out of the room, and let Suzette take his place in the big arm-chair at the head of Pierre’s bed.

For three long weeks this went on, and often it seemed that the little waif would drift out of life without being able to give the slightest clue to his identity. But at last the fever subsided, and one sunny morning, early in June, Dr Croite came from Dinard, accompanied by his son and another doctor, and a blue-robed Sister from the hospital, and with great care they performed the operation which Dr Jules had called trepanning; while out on the terrace the Vicomte and Mr Maxwell paced silently up and down, making no effort to conceal their great anxiety, and old Suzette knelt in her own little turret chamber at the top of the chÂteau, and prayed with simple fervour over her beads.

For, in spite of the fact that he had not spoken one sensible sentence to them since the moment when he had been discovered in the car, they had all grown to love the little fellow, with his pathetic brown eyes and gentle ways, which, shown as they were unconsciously, made his nurses all the surer that he was no mere peasant-boy.

At last the great glass doors which separated the hall of the chÂteau from the terrace opened, and the doctors came out.

‘Well, how is it? Will he live?’ eagerly asked the two men who had waited for them with so much impatience.

‘It seems so; everything points to it,’ replied Dr Jules, proud in the consciousness of appearing as a fully fledged surgeon before the Vicomte, who had known him ever since he was a little lad in blue blouses, who used to drive up in his father’s gig to the gates of the chÂteau, and wait under the lime-trees with Gustave the coachman and the old brown horse while his father, paying his daily visit, walked up the short avenue on foot, and vanished through the great doors, which to little Jules, gazing after him, seemed like the entrance of an enchanted palace.

The old Vicomte was alive then, though he was on his deathbed, and the young Seigneur, Monsieur Arnauld, would walk slowly back with Dr Croite to where his gig stood, discussing his father’s illness with him, and would notice the little blue-bloused boy, and pat him on the head, and ask his name, and go into the orchard and fetch him an apple.

All that seemed very far away to Dr Jules nowadays, though it seemed but yesterday to the simpler Vicomte; and he liked to have the opportunity to show the older man that he had grown up, and had taken his place in the world, and was no more a mere country youth, but a learned young doctor, whose name was well known among men of science.

‘The operation has been very successful,’ he went on, with a touch of importance in his tone, while his father and the other doctor nodded their heads to show that they agreed with him. ‘It is just as I—as we—thought. There had been a hurt, a blow most likely, and a splinter of the skull was pressing on the brain. That caused the loss of memory, the want of intellect as it were. That ought to be gone now, and when he awakes he ought to be as alive to everything that passes as any one else. Only, I would advise,’ and here he held up his hand, and blinked solemnly through his spectacles in a way that brought a twinkle to Mr Maxwell’s gray eyes, and made him look ten years younger for the moment, ‘that for the first six days or so he be left entirely to the good Sister and to the old serving-woman Suzette. They will talk to him in the Breton tongue so long as he is weak, and he will not be so apt to remember or to ask questions. Whatever his past history may have been, we must try to give his brain as much rest as possible before it is troubled by his beginning to think.’

To which advice, in spite of his amusement at Dr Jules’s manner, Mr Maxwell heartily agreed.