"Three months at least," replied the surgeon; "more if you worry
yourself about it."
"Three months!" repeated the young man, aghast. "What's to become of my
studies? I can't hold a book; I can't write; I had to have my breakfast
fed to me this morning," continued he, biting his mustache and looking
away. The professor smiled thoughtfully.
"I have hopes," said he, "that you'll know more about Divinity when you
come out of this room than you did before you went into it. We'll see
when the time comes."
"I've found out already that my bones are like other men's," remarked
Bressant, with a sigh.
"So much the better," returned the old man. "You never would have
learned that out of your Hebrew Lexicon. The best way to reach this
young fellow's soul is through his body," declared he, silently, to the
bandage he was preparing for the broken head. "This is nothing but a
blessing in disguise." But he had too much tact to carry the
conversation further, and presently left his patient alone to digest
his breakfast and the lesson it had inculcated.
This was Cornelia's last day at home; she was to take the eight-o'clock
train next morning to the city. The young lady's mood was unequal:
sometimes she drooped; anon would break forth into much talk and
merriment, which would evaporate almost as quickly as the froth of
champagne. This was her first departure from home, and the ease,
freedom, and beloved old ways of home-life, assumed more of their true
value in her eyes. She had acquired a sentiment of awe for Aunt
Margaret's grandeur. She would be obliged to sleep in corsets and
high-heeled shoes; everybody would be going through the figures of a
stately minuet all day long.
Then she began to feel in advance the wrench of separating from those
with whom her life had been spent, and from one other in whose company
she had lived more--so it seemed to her--than in all the years since she
ceased to be a child. Bressant was very prominent in her thoughts; nor
could she be blamed for this, for the short acquaintance bad been
emphasized by a disproportional number of memorable events: First, there
was the thunder-storm evening by the fountain; afterward, the dance at
Abbie's; and, following in quick succession, the celestial arch, the
walk homeward, and the catastrophe in which he had borne the chief part.
Besides, he was so different from common men.
"So perfectly natural and unaffected," she argued to herself. "He means
all he says; of course I shouldn't let him say such things to me as he
does if it weren't so; but it would be affectation in me to object to
it as it is!"--a most plausible deduction, by-the-way, but dangerous to
act upon. To persuade herself that, because he was an exceptional sort
of person, his plain way of talking to her was justifiable, was to
establish a secret understanding between him and herself, which placed
her at a disadvantage to begin with; and unreservedly to accept
compliments, even ingenuous ones, was to indulge in a luxury that must
ultimately render callous her moral sensitiveness and refinement.