"You have alighted on it, most grave and reverend sage.
You have alighted on the exact fact, so clever are you! That was precisely what I did some months back, after I heard that you, being fearful as rich men are, had been to him for some fancied ill.

You had two medicines?
You remember?
The one gave, the other soothed your trouble.

And now that you understand, now that your mind is free from care, and you can sleep without fear of the scholar's ill--will you not thank me for your cure, Messer Blondel ?" "Thank you ?" the magistrate panted.

"Thank you ?" He stepped back two paces, groping with his hands, as if he sought to support himself by the table from which he had advanced.
"Ay, thank me!" "No, but I will pay you!" and with the word Blondel snatched from the table a pistol which he had laid within his reach an hour earlier.
Before the giant, confident in his size, discovered his danger, the muzzle was at his breast.

It was too late to move then--three paces divided the men; but, in his haste to raise the pistol, Blondel had not shaken from it the handkerchief under which he had hidden it, and the lock fell on a morsel of the stuff.