“I am no spy,” I answered mildly. “I heard that you had met with an accident, and have come to cure you. I am Dr. Luxor, and here is my card.” The old man took the card, and scanned it eagerly. “You are a physician?” he inquired distrustfully. “And surgeon also.” “You are bound by oath not to reveal the secrets of your patients.” “Undoubtedly.” “I am afraid that I am hurt,” he continued faintly, half sinking back in the bed. I seized the opportunity to make a brief examination of his body. I found that the arms, a part of the chest, and a part of the face were terribly scorched; but it seemed to me that there was nothing to be apprehended but pain. “You will not reveal anything that you may learn here?” said the old man, feebly fixing his eyes on my face while I was applying a soothing ointment to the burns. “You will promise me.” I nodded assent. “Then I will trust you. Cure me—I will pay you well.” I could scarce help smiling. If Lorenzo de’ Medici, conscious of millions of ducats in his coffers, had been addressing some leech of the period, he could not have spoken with a loftier air than this inhabitant of the fourth story of a tenement house in the Seventh Avenue. “You must keep quiet,” I answered. “Let nothing irritate you. I will leave a composing draught with your daughter, which she will give you immediately. I will see you in the morning. You will be well in a week.” “Thank God!” came in a murmur from a dusk corner near the door. I turned, and beheld the dim outline of the girl, standing with clasped hands in the gloom of the dim chamber. “My daughter!” screamed the old man, once more leaping up in the bed with renewed vitality. “You have seen her, then? When? Where? Oh, may a thousand cur—” “Father! father! Anything—anything but that. Don’t, don’t curse me!” And the poor girl, rushing in, flung herself sobbing on her knees beside his pallet. “Ah, brigand! You are there, are you? Sir,” said he, turning to me, “I am the most unhappy man in the world. Talk of Sisyphus rolling the ever-recoiling stone—of Prometheus gnawed by the vulture since the birth of time. The fables yet live. There is my rock, forever crushing me back! there is my eternal vulture, feeding upon my heart! There! there! there!” And, with an awful gesture of malediction and hatred, he pointed with his wounded hand, swathed and shapeless with bandages, at the cowering, sobbing, wordless woman by his side. I was too much horror-stricken to attempt even to soothe him. The anger of blood against blood has an electric power which paralyzes bystanders.