Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the arms of his chair.

"Before I married," he said, "only a very short time before I married, I had myself looked over carefully by one of the most eminent physicians in New York. He a.s.sured me that I was in perfect physical condition, that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact----"

Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.

"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, your _biceps flexor_. How many years are you alive?"

"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand----"

"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"

"On the contrary."

"And your age?"

Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.

"Fifty," he belligerently declared.

Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.

"_Vous voila!_"

"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand----"

"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl of eighteen----"

"But I have lived a careful life!"

"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are moderate drinkers."

"I drink no more than you."

"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."

"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.

"La-la-la!"

"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely abstemious."

It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant effort to speak as if he did not.

"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."

Stainton rose.

"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.

Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled the more knowingly.

"Yet you are here," said he.

Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.

"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl----"

"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come to consult me."

"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression--all my life of--of----"

Boussingault rose at last. He came round the desk and, with a touch of genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.

"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!'

The old roue, he comes to me and says--the same thing. We all some day curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it with regard to no man."

"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."

"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of G.o.d!"

"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.

The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.

"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt, I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts--you try to live downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is not cruel. It is not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now--Poof!

It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us.

Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more.

You must yourself rest."

He darted to the desk, fumbled among its papers, wrote upon one, and handed it to Jim. Then he continued for ten minutes to talk in the same strain, as before.

"Of course," said Jim, "in a little while it would all have been easier."

"In a little while?"

"There will be a child."

Boussingault's friendliness nearly vanished.

"What?" he said. "And you--you----Thousand thunders, these Americans here!"

At this Stainton himself grew angry.

"Do you think I am a brute?" he said. "It is far off."

"Hear him!" Dr. Boussingault appealed to the ceiling. "Hear him! 'It is far off!' Name of a name! Go you one day to the consulting room of the great Pinard at the Clinique Baudelocque and read the '_Avis Important_'

he there has posted on the door."

It needed quite a quarter of an hour more for the physician to explain and for Stainton to recover his temper, which, generally gentle, had been tried by this new threat of evil and was now the more being tried by the reaction of his system against the absinthe. Then, after Madame Boussingault had been seen and the arrangements for Muriel's visit had been completed, the doctor sent him away with more advice and more exclamations against the ignorance of the average man and woman of maturity.