"Ah, Calembours, it's some time since we met. You look so flourishing that I need scarcely express a hope that you are well. Thanks for your sympathy. Don't waste it, though. I'll soon be all right, if I'm not done brown in Fortune's frying-pan. But what brings you to Key West? A consignment of tough beef?" "_Ma foi!_ you take a man up sharp, _mon ami_. I have not the affliction to see the last of the Brand spirit, gone out of you, for all the sugars and panadas of this illness. Do you suppose a consignment of anything could bring me to this _inferno_ of yellow fever and negroes? Why not sooner suggest pleasure, duty, or what say you to friendship for you, _mon camarade_?" "Pshaw! Calembours, you and I know that your capabilities of friendship could be bought at a ransom of five shillings." "_Mon Dieu!_ but you are hard on your Ludovic. Did I not squander all my little gains for to get your rights in England? Did I not give up the grand demoiselle. Marguerite, to you, when she might have been the countess, when she might have loved me? Ah, _mon_ colonel, you have me to thank for all your good fortune, and yet you will not lift the eyes to thank me." "Brag was an impudent dog; still, there's my hand, comrade, and in virtue of my present happiness, which you helped to bring about, take a hearty squeeze." The chevalier squeezed it, and declared, with tears in his eyes, that he was the luckiest dog out of Paris in possessing such a fine _camarade_. "You shall now hear my little plan in having ventured to this infectious place," he cried. "Your glorious mademoiselle had struck such frenzy of admiration into my soul that the instant Madame Hesslein released me from attending upon her--curse Madame Hesslein"--his visage grew pale with uncontrollable rage--"I determined to follow Mademoiselle Walsingham here, and to find if the plague had spared her, and if she was left without protection, (for I must tell you, _mon ami_, that I had no hope of seeing you alive again), to offer her my poor help and escort back to her home and friends in Surrey, and to be the friend in need to her until she turned me away. "I come full of these glorious plans of benevolence which might well ennoble any man, and find--hey, presto! the romance has turned the other way! My colonel still lives, being conjured back to life by undiluted fidelity; the lawyer with the knotty head has argued the plague out of conceit of him, and the glorious mademoiselle is a _fiancee_; so I bury my too fond plans for mademoiselle's welfare, and I crucify the flesh, and say to myself: "'I will be the good fairy for these two people; will be the mason to build the steps to their summit of bliss; I will be the porter to carry them thence.' "So I fly to you--behold me--I am here to act as manager--I glow with the eagerness of friendship." "And in return, what do you expect?" Calembours shrugged his shoulders and grinned.