"Your practice is new to me; but if you have studied medicine, that's
another matter. Will you guarantee the success of your plan?"

"Yes."

"Mind, I wash my hands of it; I take Mr. Jones to witness;" and he
appealed to the valet.

"Call up the footman and lift your master," said Dalibard; and the
doctor, glancing round, saw that a bath, filled some seven or eight
inches deep with water, stood already prepared in the room. Perplexed
and irresolute, he offered no obstacle to Dalibard's movements. The
body, seemingly lifeless, was placed in the bath; and the servants,
under Dalibard's directions, applied vigorous and incessant friction.
Several minutes elapsed before any favourable symptom took place. At
length Sir Miles heaved a deep sigh, and the eyes moved; a minute or two
more, and the teeth chattered; the blood, set in motion, appeared on the
surface of the skin; life ebbed back. The danger was passed, the
dark foe driven from the citadel. Sir Miles spoke audibly, though
incoherently, as he was taken back to his bed, warmly covered up, the
lights removed, noise forbidden, and Dalibard and the doctor remained in
silence by the bedside.

"Rich man," thought Dalibard, "thine hour is not yet come; thy wealth
must not pass to the boy Mainwaring." Sir Miles's recovery, under the
care of Dalibard, who now had his own way, was as rapid and complete as
before. Lucretia when she heard, the next morning, of the attack, felt,
we dare not say a guilty joy, but a terrible and feverish agitation.
Sir Miles himself, informed by his valet of Dalibard's wrestle with the
doctor, felt a profound gratitude and reverent wonder for the simple
means to which he probably owed his restoration; and he listened, with
a docility which Dalibard was not prepared to expect, to his learned
secretary's urgent admonitions as to the life he must lead if he desired
to live at all. Convinced, at last, that wine and good cheer had not
blockaded out the enemy, and having to do, in Olivier Dalibard, with a
very different temper from the doctor's, he assented with a tolerable
grace to the trial of a strict regimen and to daily exercise in the
open air. Dalibard now became constantly with him; the increase of his
influence was as natural as it was apparent. Lucretia trembled; she
divined a danger in his power, now separate from her own, and which
threatened to be independent of it. She became abstracted and uneasy;
jealousy of the Provencal possessed h