A heavy step crunched the gravel and I heard my name pronounced in a deep inquiring rumble—­the voice of Professor Keredec, no less.  Nor was I greatly surprised, since our meeting in the forest had led me to expect some advances on his part toward friendliness, or, at least, in the direction of a better acquaintance.  However, I withheld my reply for a moment to make sure I had heard aright.

The name was repeated.

“Here I am,” I called, “in the pavilion, if you wish to see me.”

“Aha!  I hear you become an invalid, my dear sir.”  With that the professor’s great bulk loomed in the doorway against the glare outside.  “I have come to condole with you, if you allow it.”

“To smoke with me, too, I hope,” I said, not a little pleased.

“That I will do,” he returned, and came in slowly, walking with perceptible lameness.  “The sympathy I offer is genuine:  it is not only from the heart, it is from the latissimus dorsi” he continued, seating himself with a cavernous groan.  “I am your confrere in illness, my dear sir.  I have choosed this fine weather for rheumatism of the back.”

“I hope it is not painful.”

“Ha, it is so-so,” he rumbled, removing his spectacles and wiping his eyes, dazzled by the sun.  “There is more of me than of most men—­more to suffer.  Nature was generous to the little germs when she made this big Keredec; she offered them room for their campaigns of war.”

“You’ll take a cigarette?”

“I thank you; if you do not mind, I smoke my pipe.”

He took from his pocket a worn leather case, which he opened, disclosing a small, browned clay bowl of the kind workmen use; and, fitting it with a red stem, he filled it with a dark and sinister tobacco from a pouch.  “Always my pipe for me,” he said, and applied a match, inhaling the smoke as other men inhale the light smoke of cigarettes.  “Ha, it is good!  It is wicked for the insides, but it is good for the soul.”  And clouds wreathed his great beard like a storm on Mont Blanc as he concluded, with gusto, “It is my first pipe since yesterday.”

“That is being a good smoker,” I ventured sententiously; “to whet indulgence with abstinence.”

“My dear sir,” he protested, “I am a man without even enough virtue to be an epicure.  When I am alone I am a chimney with no hebdomadary repose; I smoke forever.  It is on account of my young friend I am temperate now.”

“He has never smoked, your young friend?” I asked, glancing at my visitor rather curiously, I fear.

“Mr. Saffren has no vices.”  Professor Keredec replaced his silver-rimmed spectacles and turned them upon me with serene benevolence.  “He is in good condition, all pure, like little children—­and so if I smoke near him he chokes and has water at the eyes, though he does not complain.  Just now I take a vacation:  it is his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window than at his book.  He looks very much from the window”—­there was a muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor’s torso, and took to be his expression of a chuckle—­“yes, very much, since the passing of that charming lady some days ago.”