The hearers listened in silence. This _blague_ and _bagout_ so essentially Parisian were his, doubtless, by some curious trick of ancestry, but it was rather gruesome just then. “Won’t they laugh at home...!” The sickening drone went on. “I! caught in a double cross like this ... good for crabs and evil tongues.... Great Scott! isn’t that a treat!” He laughed a ghastly ringing laugh that suddenly choked in his throat, and gave a grimace of pain that brought the doctors back to his side. “I thought he could not feel--anything?” Tatiana murmured, profoundly shocked. “If one must see him suffer too--” “Reassure yourself, Madame la Duchesse. He does not really feel--as yet, and this wandering of the mind is quite natural. It is when he comes to himself that your kindly task will be--er--difficult.” It was _Docteur Tant-Mieux_ who spoke, rubbing the tips of his long surgical fingers together, as if washing his hands of all doubt on the subject. “Is there,” Salvières said, coming forward, “any danger in moving him to more comfortable quarters?” The two _confrères_ glanced swiftly at each other. “Do you,” inquired the optimist, “see any risk, Docteur de Partenay, in the patient’s being carried to the château, as Monsieur le Duc so thoughtfully suggests?” “Hummmm-m,” the pessimist hesitated. “Not a very great deal, provided the transportation is done on a water-mattress and by very careful bearers; but no doubt the infirmary of the Castle--about which I have heard so much”--here he bowed first to the Duke and then to the Duchess--“can be called upon for all appliances necessary.” “And,” resumed Salvières, “will it be impossible, say in a few days, to put the--patient on a yacht and take him back to his own land? He--he--is an American.” “In this season, Monsieur le Duc, _la belle saison_,” the great man addressed responded, visibly undeterred by a newly awakened squall that was shrieking its way around and around the “Station,” “I should say not; but with your permission my colleague and I will answer your question after a second examination of the patient, when he has been removed from here. You have no doubt considered the necessity of our spending the night at Salvières.” “Certainly,” Tatiana and Jean exclaimed together. “Jean,” she went on, “will you be so good as to give orders to have ‘Mr. Harrington’ moved to the Louis XI. suite on the ground floor of the west wing. The ground floor will be advisable, messieurs, is it not so? Besides, it is in the newer portion of the house and very comfortably installed,” and she turned to the doctors. To this they agreed, much impressed, in spite of their professional phlegm, by the simplicity with which this Duchess referred to a wing dating back five hundred years as the “newer portion” of her Castle.