The perambulator which we were following in silence came to a halt in the Bois Saint-Jean. The governess lowered the hood. Marguerite lay with her head thrown back, her eyes big with terror, and she was stretching out her arms to push aside something that we could not see. Oh, I guessed well enough what invisible hand it was. The same hand that had touched the mother was now laid upon the child. I fell on my knees. But the phantom departed and Marguerite, raising her head, lay resting peacefully. I gathered some flowers and laid them reverently beside her. She smiled. Seeing her come back to life I gave her more flowers and sang to her, endeavouring to beguile her. The air and the feeling of happiness she now experienced brought back to her that desire to live which had forsaken her. At the end of an hour her cheeks were almost rosy. When it grew cool and we had to take the little suffering child back to the château again, her father took my hand as we parted and, pressing it, said in suppliant tones: “Come again to-morrow.” [Illustration: 084] [Illustration: 086] 21 st August I returned next day. On the steps of the Empire château I encountered the family doctor. He is a spare, elderly man whom you meet wherever there is good music to be heard. He seems like a man perpetually listening to the harmonies of some inward concert. He is for ever under the spell of sounds and lives by his ear alone. He is specially noted for his treatment of nervous complaints. Some say he is a genius; others that he is mad. Certainly there is something peculiar about him. When I saw him he was coming down the steps; his feet, his finger and his lips moving in time to some intricate measure. “Well, doctor,” I said with an involuntary quaver in my voice, “and how is your little patient?” “She means to live,” he answered. “You will pull her through for us, won’t you?” I said eagerly. “I tell you she means to live.” “And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really want to and that we do not die save with our own consent?” “Certainly.” I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the gate, his head bowed as if in thought. “Certainly,” he said again, “but they must really want to and not merely think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in which all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is unconscious, it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and when it fails we cease to be. The world _wills_, otherwise it would not exist.” We walked on a few steps farther. “Look here,” he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads, “if that fellow there had not _willed_ to grow, I should like to know what power could have made him do so.”