"Yes, sir, my wife is good and intrepid," replied Martial, with emphasis, and regarding La Louve with an air at once full of love and tenderness. "Yes, intrepid; for she has also come in time to save my life." "Your life?" exclaimed the comte. "Look at his hands--his poor hands!" said La Louve, wiping away the tears which softened the wild brightness of her eyes. "Horrible!" cried the comte. "See, doctor, how his hands are hacked!" Doctor Griffon, turning his head slightly, and looking over his shoulder at Martial's hands, said to him, "Open and shut your hand." Martial did so with considerable pain. The doctor shrugged his shoulders, and continued his attentions to Fleur-de-Marie, saying merely, and as if with regret: "There's nothing serious in those cuts,--there's no tendon injured. In a week the subject will be able to use his hands again." "Then, sir, my husband will not be crippled?" said La Louve, with gratitude. The doctor shook his head affirmatively. "And La Goualeuse will recover--won't she, sir?" inquired La Louve. "Oh, she must live, for I and my husband owe her so much!" Then turning towards Martial, "Poor dear girl! There she is, as I told you,--she who will, perhaps, be the cause of our happiness; for it was she who gave me the idea of coming and saying to you all I have said. What a chance that I should save her--and here, too!" "She is a providence," said Martial, struck by the beauty of La Goualeuse. "What an angel's face! Oh, she will recover, will she not, doctor?" "I cannot say," replied the doctor. "But, in the first place, can she remain here? Will she have all necessary attention?" "Here?" cried La Louve; "why, they commit murder here!" "Silence--silence!" said Martial. The comte and the doctor looked at La Louve with surprise. "This house in the isle has a bad reputation hereabouts, and I am not astonished at it," observed the doctor, in a low tone, to M. de Saint-Remy. "You have, then, been the victim of some violence?" observed the comte to Martial. "How did you come by those wounds?" "They are nothing--nothing, sir. I had a quarrel--a struggle ensued, and I was wounded. But this young peasant girl cannot remain in this house," he added, with a gloomy air. "I cannot remain here myself--nor my wife, nor my brother, nor my sister, whom you see. We are going to leave the isle, never to return to it." "Oh, how nice!" exclaimed the two children. "Then what are we to do?" said the doctor, looking at Fleur-de-Marie. "It is impossible to think of conveying the subject to Paris in her present state of prostration. But then my house is quite close at hand, my gardener's wife and her daughter are capital nurses; and since this asphyxia by submersion interests you, my dear Saint-Remy, why, you can watch over the necessary attentions, and I will come and see her every day."