Boots! think of it, she who for three years had not even been able to wear a slipper.
Pierre, who had become grave, waxing pale with the secret uneasiness which was penetrating him, continued to look at her.

And he also asked her other questions.

She was certainly not lying, and he merely suspected a slow distortion of the actual truth, an easily explained embellishment of the real facts amidst all the joy she felt at being cured and becoming an important little personage.

Who now knew if the cicatrisation of her injuries, effected, so it was asserted, completely, instantaneously, in a few seconds, had not in reality been the work of days?
Where were the witnesses?
Just then Madame de Jonquiere began to relate that she had been at the hospital at the time referred to.

"Sophie was not in my ward," said she, "but I had met her walking lame that very morning--" Pierre hastily interrupted the lady-hospitaller.