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Doctor Dalichamp dropped in every morning on his way to the hospital and examined and dressed the wound. As the ball had passed out, after breaking the tibia, he was surprised that the case presented no better aspect; he feared there was a splinter of the bone remaining there that he had not succeeded in finding with the probe, and that might make resection necessary.

As soon as it was fairly dark, Doctor Dalichamp came driving up in his old gig. It was his intention to see Maurice to the frontier.

On the second day of his employment Jean remained too long on foot, and the doctor's secret fears proved not to be unfounded; the wound opened, the leg became greatly inflamed and swollen, he was compelled to take to his bed again. Dalichamp suspected that the mischief was due to a spicule of bone that the two consecutive days of violent exercise had served to liberate.

In the morning, after Doctor Dalichamp had attended to his patient, he liked to sit a while and chat, putting his cares aside for the moment. Sometimes he also returned at evening and made a longer visit, and it was in this way that they learned what was going on in the great world outside their peaceful solitude and the terrible calamities that were desolating their country.

Doctor Dalichamp had clambered into his gig and was calling to Maurice. The young man threw all his heart and soul into the embrace he gave his sister Henriette, who, pale as death in her black mourning garments, looked on his face in silence through her tears. "He whom I leave to your care is my brother. Watch over him, love him as I love him!"

Doctor Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessary beds, sheets and pillows, and every day he had to accomplish miracles to keep his patients alive, to obtain for them bread, meat and desiccated vegetables, to say nothing of bandages, compresses and other appliances.

Maurice, who was just beginning to be aware how utterly prostrated he was by his fatigue, was drinking a glass of wine and eating a bit of cold meat, left over from the yesterday's dinner, when Doctor Dalichamp came in, as was his daily custom previous to visiting the hospital, and the young man, in his anxiety for his friend, mustered up his strength to follow him, together with his sister, to the bedside of the patient.