"Allow me, sir, in my office as doctor, to recommend a glass of that _Starka_, a true Cognac brandy casked forty years ago. It is a queen of liqueurs. Take a Drontheim anchovy; nothing is better for opening and preparing the digestive organs, the most important functions of the body.... And now to table. Why do we not speak in German? You come from Koenigsberg, I from Memel; but I took my degree at Jéna. We shall be more at ease in that way, and the servants, who only know Polish and Russian, will not understand us." We ate at first in silence; then, after having taken our first glass of Madeira, I inquired of the doctor if the Count were often inconvenienced by the indisposition which deprived us of his presence that night. "Yes and no," was the doctor's answer. "It depends upon what expeditions he takes." "How so?" "When he takes the road to Rosienie, for instance, he comes back with headache, and in a savage temper." "I have been to Rosienie myself without such an experience." "It depends, Professor," he replied, laughing, "on whether you are in love." I sighed, thinking of Mlle. Gertrude Weber. "Does the Count's _fiancée_, then, live at Rosienie?" I said. "Yes, in that neighbourhood; but I cannot say whether she is affianced to him. She is a real flirt, and will drive him off his head, so that he will be in his mother's state." "Indeed, then her ladyship is ... an invalid?" "She is mad, my dear sir, mad; and I was even madder to come here!" "Let us hope that your able attentions will restore her to reason." The doctor shook his head, and looked attentively at the colour of the glass of Bordeaux which he held in his hand. "The man you see before you, Professor, was once surgeon-major in the Kalouga regiment. At Sevastopol we cut off arms and legs from morning till night; not to speak of bombs which came down among us as thick as flies on a galled horse. But, though I was then ill-lodged and ill-fed, I was not so bored as I am here, where I eat and drink of the best, am lodged like a prince, and paid like a Court physician.... But liberty, my dear sir!... As you can guess, with this she-dragon I have not a moment to call my own." "Has she been under your care for long?" "Less than two years; but she has been insane at least twenty-seven, since before the birth of the Count. Did no one tell you this either at Rosienie or Kowno? Listen, then, for it is a case on which I should like some day to write an article for the _Medical Journal_ of St. Petersburg. She went mad from fear...." "From fear? How was such a thing possible?"