Perhaps a
little torture would do it, he thought; and so he had made the rather
tactless remark about the scarcity of dollars. Also his look was
incredulous when Jean Jacques protested that he had enough to pay the
fee.
"When you searched me you forgot to look in the right place," continued
Jean Jacques; and he drew from the lining of the hat he held in his hand
a little bundle of ten-dollar bills. "Here--take your pay from them," he
said, and held out the roll of bills. "I suppose it won't be more than
four dollars a day; and there's enough, I think. I can't pay you for
your kindness to me, and I don't want to. I'd like to owe you that; and
it's a good thing for a man himself to be owed kindness. He remembers it
when he gets older. It helps him to forgive himself more or less for
what he's sorry for in life. I've enough in this bunch to pay for board
and professional attendance, or else the price has gone up since I had a
doctor before."
He laughed now, and the laugh was half-ironical, half-protesting. It
seemed to come from the well of a hidden past; and no past that is hidden
has ever been a happy past.
The Young Doctor took the bills, looked at them as though they were
curios, and then returned them with the remark that they were of a kind
and denomination of no use to him.
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