It happened however, on that day, that Jenkins' maroon-lined _coupe_ was waiting in a corner of the courtyard. The duke, who had been feeling badly the day before, felt still worse when he left the breakfast table, and lost no time in sending for the man of the pearls in order to question him concerning his singular condition. He had no pain anywhere, slept well and had his usual appetite; but there was a most extraordinary sensation of weariness and of terrible cold, which nothing could overcome. So it was that, at that moment, notwithstanding the lovely spring sunshine which flooded his room and put to shame the flame blazing on his hearth as in the depth of winter, the duke was shivering in his blue firs, between his little screens, and as he wrote his name on divers documents for a clerk from his office, on a low lacquered table that stood so near the fire that the lacquer came off in scales, he kept holding his benumbed fingers to the blaze, which might have scorched them on the surface without restoring circulation and life to their bloodless rigidity. Was it anxiety caused by the indisposition of his illustrious patient? At all events Jenkins seemed nervous, excited, strode up and down the room, prying and sniffing to right and left, trying to find in the air something that he believed to be there, something subtle and intangible, like the faint trace of a perfume or the invisible mark left by a passing bird. He could hear the wood snapping on the hearth, the sound of papers hastily turned, the duke's indolent voice, indicating in a word or two, always concise and clear, the answer to a letter of four pages, and the clerk's respectful monosyllables: "Yes, Monsieur le Ministre." "No, Monsieur le Ministre." Outside, the swallows whistled merrily over the water, and some one was playing a clarinet in the direction of the bridges. "It is impossible," said the minister abruptly, rising from his chair. "Take them away, Lartigues. You can come again, to-morrow. I can't write, I am too cold. Just feel my hands, doctor, and tell me if you would not say they were just out of a pail of iced water. My whole body has been like that for two days. It's absurd enough in such weather!" "It doesn't surprise me," growled the Irishman in a surly, short tone, very unusual in that mellifluous voice. The door had closed behind the young clerk, who carried away his documents with a majestic stiffness of bearing, but was very happy, I fancy, to feel that he was at liberty, and to have the opportunity, before returning to the department, to saunter for an hour or two in the Tuileries, overflowing at that hour with spring dresses and pretty girls seated around the still unoccupied chairs of the musicians under the flowering chestnut trees, which quivered from top to bottom with the glad thrill of the month of nests. He was not frozen, not he.