ou with
an infinite number of domestic particulars--in return, I presume, for
your polite attention in taking her by the hand. May I ask what she
could tell you about her husband's letter, so far as her husband has
written it?"

"Mrs. Armadale could tell me nothing," replied the doctor, with a sudden
formality in his manner, which showed that his forbearance was at last
failing him. "Before she was composed enough to think of the letter, her
husband had asked for it, and had caused it to be locked up in his desk.
She knows that he has since, time after time, tried to finish it, and
that, time after time, the pen has dropped from his fingers. She knows,
when all other hope of his restoration was at an end, that his medical
advisers encouraged him to hope in the famous waters of this place. And
last, she knows how that hope has ended; for she knows what I told her
husband this morning."

The frown which had been gathering latterly on Mr. Neal's face deepened
and darkened. He looked at the doctor as if the doctor had personally
offended him.

"The more I think of the position you are asking me to take," he said,
"the less I like it. Can you undertake to say positively that Mr.
Armadale is in his right mind?"

"Yes; as positively as words can say it."

"Does his wife sanction your coming here to request my interference?"

"His wife sends me to you--the only Englishman in Wildbad--to write for
your dying countryman what he cannot write for himself; and what no one
else in this place but you can write for him."

That answer drove Mr. Neal back to the last inch of ground left him to
stand on. Even on that inch the Scotchman resisted still.

"Wait a little!" he said. "You put it strongly; let us be quite sure you
put it correctly as well. Let us be quite sure there is nobody to take
this responsibility but myself. There is a mayor in Wildbad, to
begin with--a man who possesses an official character to justify his
interference."

"A man of a thousand," said the doctor. "With one fault--he knows no
language but his own."

"There is an English legation at Stuttgart," persisted Mr. Neal.

"And there are miles on miles of the forest between this and Stuttgart,"
rejoined the doctor. "If we sent this moment, we could get no help from
the legation before to-morrow; and it is as likely as not, in the
state of this dying man's articulation, that to-morrow may find him
speechless. I don't know whether his last wishes are wis