"Wrong in the last particular,--quite wrong, my dear viscount," said a bland and unctuous voice behind de Mellay. The young men turned and found themselves face to face with a comely middle-aged personage, whose smug costume of professional black was relieved by a red ribbon in the button-hole, and who, gliding into the stall in their rear, whilst they were engrossed with their conversation, had overheard its latter sentences. "Ha! doctor," exclaimed the viscount, "you here, and eavesdropping! How am I wrong, most sapient and debonair of Galens?" Dr Pilori was a physician in high practice, and of a class not uncommon in Paris,--at once a man of pleasure and a votary of science. With a fair share of talent and an inordinate one of self-conceit, he had pushed himself forward in his profession, applying himself, in conformity with the Parisian rage for _spécialités_, particularly to one class of complaint. The lungs were the organ he had taken under his special protection: his word was law in all cases of pulmonary disease. He was physician to an hospital, member of the Legion of Honour, and of innumerable learned societies; his portrait graced the shop-windows of medical booksellers, whilst his works, on maladies of the lungs, occupied a prominent place on their shelves. His patients were numerous and his fees large. So far the man of science. The man of pleasure occupied a gorgeous apartment in the vicinity of the Madeleine; gave smart and frequent soirées (as one means of increasing his connection), where singers of the first water gave their notes in payment of his advice. He was frequently at the opera,--occasionally at the Café de Paris,--lived on bad terms with his wife, and on good ones with a ballet-dancer, and was in request as an attendant at duels amongst the young dandies of the clubs, with most of whom he was on a footing of familiarity amounting almost to intimacy. "How am I wrong, doctor?" repeated de Mellay. "In your prediction of Fatello's longevity. Of course it is of him you speak?" "Of no other. What ails him?" "He is dying of consumption," gravely replied Pilori. The viscount laughed incredulously, and even Steinfeld could not restrain a smile, so little appearance was there of a consumptive habit in the robust frame, and coarse, rough physiognomy of the financier. "Laugh if you please, young gentlemen," said the doctor. "It is no laughing matter for Monsieur Fatello, I can tell you. His life is not worth a year's purchase." "You have been prescribing for him then, doctor?" said Arthur, maliciously.