agreeable? May
every man who opens another man's letter find that letter a trap. Here
comes your medicine. You never drink champagne in the middle of the
day, of course?"

"Oh, no."

"Then it will be all the better medicine."

He made both mistress and maid eat the thin slices of beef and drink a
glass of champagne.

While they were thus fortifying themselves he wrote his address on some
stamped envelopes, and gave them to Lady Bassett, and told her she had
better write to him at once if anything occurred. "You must also write
to me if you really cannot get to see your husband. Then I will come
down myself, with the public press at my back. But I am sure that will
not be necessary in Dr. Suaby's asylum. He is a better Christian than I
am, confound him for it! You went too soon; your husband had been
agitated by the capture; Suaby was away; Salter had probably applied
what he imagined to be soothing remedies, leeches--a blister--morphia.
Result, the patient was so much worse than he was before they touched
him that Salter was ashamed to let you see him. Having really excited
him, instead of soothing him, Sawbones Salter had to pretend that _you_
would excite him. As if creation contained any mineral, drug simple,
leech, Spanish fly, gadfly, or showerbath, so soothing as a loving wife
is to a man in affliction. New reading of an old song:

'If the heart of a man is oppressed with cares,
It makes him much worse when a woman appears.'

"Go to-morrow; you will see him. He will be worse than he was; but not
much. Somebody will have told him that his wife put him in there--"

"Oh! oh!"

"And he won't have believed it. His father was a Bassett; his mother a
Le Compton; his great-great-great-grandmother was a Rolfe: there is no
cur's blood in him. After the first shock he will have found the spirit
and dignity of a gentleman to sustain adversity: these men of fashion
are like that; they are better steel than women--and writers."

When he had said this he indicated by his manner that he thought he had
exhausted the subject, and himself.

Lady Bassett rose and said, "Then, sir, I will take my leave; and oh! I
am sorry I have not your eloquent pen or your eloquent tongue to thank
you. You have interested yourself in a stranger--you have brought the
power of a great mind to bear on our distress. I came here a widow--now
I feel a wife again. Your good words have warmed my very heart. I can
only pray God to bles