“So that this strain of the knee,” continued d’Artagnan, “my dear Porthos, keeps you in bed?”

“My God, that’s all. I shall be about again in a few days.”

“Why did you not have yourself conveyed to Paris? You must be cruelly bored here.”

“That was my intention; but, my dear friend, I have one thing to confess to you.”

“What’s that?”

“It is that as I was cruelly bored, as you say, and as I had the seventy-five pistoles in my pocket which you had distributed to me, in order to amuse myself I invited a gentleman who was traveling this way to walk up, and proposed a cast of dice.