The boy was not in the least put out, but looked placidly back at the Doctor.
'Is this your father ?' asked Desprez.
'Oh, no,' returned the boy; 'my master.' 'Are you fond of him ?' continued the Doctor.
'No, sir,' said the boy.
Madame Tentaillon and Desprez exchanged expressive glances.
'That is bad, my man,' resumed the latter, with a shade of sternness.
'Every one should be fond of the dying, or conceal their sentiments; and your master here is dying.

If I have watched a bird a little while stealing my cherries, I have a thought of disappointment when he flies away over my garden wall, and I see him steer for the forest and vanish.
How much more a creature such as this, so strong, so astute, so richly endowed with faculties! When I think that, in a few hours, the speech will be silenced, the breath extinct, and even the shadow vanished from the wall, I who never saw him, this lady who knew him only as a guest, are touched with some affection.' The boy was silent for a little, and appeared to be reflecting.
'You did not know him,' he replied at last, 'he was a bad man.' 'He is a little pagan,' said the landlady.

'For that matter, they are all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not.

They have no interior.' But the Doctor was still scrutinising the little pagan, his eyebrows knotted and uplifted.
'What is your name ?' he asked.
'Jean-Marie,' said the lad.
Desprez leaped upon him with one of his sudden flashes of excitement, and felt his head all over from an ethnological point of view.
'Celtic, Celtic!' he said.
'Celtic!' cried Madame Tentaillon, who had perhaps confounded the word with hydrocephalous.

'Poor lad! is it dangerous ?' 'That depends,' returned the Doctor grimly.