Once more, in the persistently technical tone of this dry and unfeeling speech, Landri detected that instinctive hostility, unintelligible to him, which he had always encountered in Pierre. The physician had lectured in order to avoid having to talk. And not a word of inquiry as to his own father, when they had not met for more than a year! Not a word about M. de Claviers-Grandchamp, who had always been so kind to him! Pierre Chaffin had an excuse--the ill-humor in which his master, Professor Louvet, had put him by asking him not to leave Rue de Solferino. The head of the clinic obeyed his "grand pontiff,"--the students irreverently give that title to the masters on whom their futures depend,--and he relieved himself by being ungracious to one who, more than all others, represented that fashionable society to the prestige of which his chief sacrificed him. There was not the slightest failure of professional duty. A physician must not cavil at his science,--with the friends of a patient. That was nothing--that theory concerning the dreams of delirium--except a slightly pedantic excursus. It was sufficient to cause the words extorted from Jaubourg by the intoxication of his disease, if the crisis should come on in Landri's presence, to assume an entirely different meaning in the young man's mind. Alas! he had no need of that scientific "key." Unaided he would have deciphered only too easily the dying man's words! They carried their terrifying clearness with them. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a death-bed insanity would have left room for a doubt which the scientist's lucid diagnosis had made untenable. When Madame de Claviers' son entered his chamber, the dying man seemed to be exhausted by the high fever of the night, and to be more calm. He lay on a bed in the middle of the room, himself a curiosity for exhibition, like all the articles of furniture of that room, brought together during many years, with the painstaking zeal of a collector. This elegance of stage-setting rendered more painful the last hours of the old man, whose appearance shocked Landri, warned though he had been. The cheeks were burning, the whole face hyperæmic; the eyes shone with the unnatural brilliancy of suffering, and the hurried, almost spasmodic, dilatation of the nostrils told of the struggle against suffocation.