approval, but Paul was looking at the dog, now quiet and docile at his master's bidding, and he was thinking to himself:
"If we could only thus keep our passions on a leash!" And then he said aloud, but in an absent-minded way, "Oh yes, he can wait till the doctor comes to-morrow. But he is seriously ill, all the same."
"Well then, if he is seriously ill," persisted the keeper firmly and not without contempt for the priest's apparent indifference, "a man had better go for the doctor at once. The old fellow can pay, he is not a pauper. But his granddaughter disobeyed my orders and did not give him the medicine I myself prepared and left for him."
"He should receive the Communion first of all," said Paul.
"But you have told me that a sick person may receive the Communion even if they are not fasting?"
"Well then," said the priest, losing patience at last, "the old man did not want the medicine; he clenched his teeth, and he has them all still
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