We recognise him at once and love him from his very entrance on the twelfth page, when he comes in, out of the mud, and the dark, whistling the air of a country reel, and greeting, with kind, quizzical observant eyes, the two young girls mending the linen in his parlour. ‘Il avait un visage de vieux chef gaulois, coloré, couperosé aux pommettes, les cheveux gris, l’œil bleu saillant, le nez aquilin, la mâchoire solide sous une longue moustache dédorée. Comme il inclinait la tête, on voyait l’attache puissante du cou, et cette forme du crâne qui s’unit à la nuque par une ligne droite, caractéristique chez les gens du Plateau central. Les épaules étaient carrées, le torse trapu; les jambes un peu arquées devaient peser lourd sur le sol. Toute la personne--sans finesse mais non pas sans noblesse--d’Étienne Cayrol, révélait l’origine paysanne. Elle exprimait la force, une force stable, lente, réfléchie, sûre d’elle même.’ And yet (an observation admirably in accordance with the history of the type) some secret defect of judgment condemns the dearest schemes of the doctor (so well considered, so unselfish in their working out, so noble and yet practical in their aim), but destined none the less, to miscarry and ‘gang aft agley.’ His unfinished sanatorium scars the hill-top with the mean unsightly ruins of uncompleted work; and the consumptive youth, whom he takes into his own home to nurse back to health, not only dies, but seduces the doctor’s only daughter: the girl who was the pride of his heart, as the sanatorium was the dream of his mind. Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, and pure. At twenty-seven years of age she no longer thinks of herself as a young girl; she is not concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that she tends the young consumptive, a few years younger than herself, who is so eager to live, so ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable judgment and pitiful heart see from the first as marked with the signs of his doom. Denise attracts the hapless Jean with all the force and promise of her health. When the doctor suspects the secret engagement that binds his daughter to his patient, he is both jealous and indignant (for he cannot conceive how a woman can love a consumptive), and he sends Jean away into a sanatorium. But Jean falls ill; Denise rushes to his death-bed, and then and there (in a wild pitiful desire to pour out all the best of life, in one moment, while there is time) she yields to his fevered desire; she succumbs.