"I deny--" began Dr. Remy, with his wonted audacity. But, at this moment, his office-boy, Scipio, thrust his woolly head in the door with the laconic intimation,-- "Sent for, massa. Drefful hurry." "And in good time," laughed the doctor. "I was forgetting my professional duty to you,--which was, to have left you long ago to the sleep which you so much need, and which you may now safely and profitably take. Good night." For some moments, Bergan lay thinking over the conversation. Never had Dr. Remy's low and limited notions of life been so nakedly presented to his abhorrent gaze. A certain distrust and dread awoke within him, accompanied by a chill creeping of the flesh, as at something not altogether human. It impressed him that there was a dark and sinister peculiarity about this man, with the rarely cultivated intellect and the inert affections,--this man whom he had so long called his friend, and who, so far as he knew, had not ill deserved the name;--a peculiarity that could not fail to be pernicious to lives and characters too intimately connected with him. Running over in his mind the whole course of their acquaintance, he could not remember ever to have heard the doctor give utterance to one lofty aspiration, one purely benign impulse, one word of hearty sympathy or generous affection. His opinions and beliefs were chill products of the intellect, unwarmed by any glow of the affections, unpurified by any strict assay of conscience. And Bergan was just beginning to discover that, while pretending to great breadth and depth, they were really narrow, because limited to life and earth, and shallow, because never penetrating below or above the reach of the human intellect, when his thoughts suddenly began to grow vague and dim, as if seen through a mist, and the next moment, he was sound asleep. Meanwhile, much to his surprise, as well as gratification, Doctor Remy was hastening toward Bergan Hall. Maumer Rue being suddenly seized with alarming symptoms, the Major's head man, Ben, had been despatched to Berganton, with instructions not to return without a physician. In his haste and anxiety, it had not occurred to the Major to make any exception; though he retained a sufficiently angry reminiscence of Doctor Remy's cool and satirical demeanor, on the occasion of his ill-fated visit of reconciliation to Bergan, to have prompted one, if he had bethought himself of it in time. Ben, therefore, having sought two other representatives of the medical profession without success, finally presented himself at Dr. Remy's office. There the doctor found him, on quitting Bergan's room; and in very brief space of time, the two were driving swiftly up the long avenue, through a moonlight that was scarcely less illuminative than sunshine, and far more beautifying, by reason of the soft charm with which it enhanced beauties while it concealed defects.