“SABLE.  Why, my lord, you can’t in conscience put me off so; I must do according to my orders, cut you up, and embalm you, except you’ll come down a little deeper than you talk of; you don’t consider the charges I have been at already.

“LORD BRUMPTON.  Charges! for what?

“SABLE.  First, twenty guineas to my lady’s woman for notice of your death (a fee I’ve before now known the widow herself go halves in), but no matter for that—­in the next place, ten pounds for watching you all your long fit of sickness last winter—­

“LORD BRUMPTON.  Watching me?  Why I had none but my own servants by turns!

“SABLE.  I mean attending to give notice of your death.  I had all your long fit of sickness, last winter, at half a crown a day, a fellow waiting at your gate to bring me intelligence, but you unfortunately recovered, and I lost all my obliging pains for your service.

“LORD BRUMPTON.  Ha! ha! ha!  Sable, thou’rt a very impudent fellow.  Half a crown a day to attend my decease, and dost thou reckon it to me?”

“SABLE....  I have a book at home, which I call my doomsday-book, where I have every man of quality’s age and distemper in town, and know when you should drop.  Nay, my lord, if you had reflected upon your mortality half so much as poor I have for you, you would not desire to return to life thus—­in short, I cannot keep this a secret, under the whole money I am to have for burying you.”

* * * * *

Of course Lady Brumpton is discomfited and disgraced at the end of the play, and, of course, Lord Brumpton is reconciled to his son—­for Steele took care that virtue should be rewarded and the moral code otherwise preserved.  As to her ladyship, who has proved a very entertaining sort of villain, we shall take leave of her in one of the best scenes of the comedy: 

“WIDOW. [Reading the names of the visitors who have called to leave their condolences] Mrs. Frances and Mrs. Winnifred Glebe, who are they?”

“TATTLEAID.  They are the country great fortunes, have been out of town this whole year; they are those whom your ladyship said upon being very well-born took upon them to be very ill-bred.”

“WIDOW.  Did I say so?  Really I think it was apt enough; now I remember them.  Lady Wrinkle—­oh, that smug old woman! there is no enduring her affectation of youth; but I plague her; I always ask whether her daughter in Wiltshire has a grandchild yet or not.  Lady Worth—­I can’t bear her company; [aside] she has so much of that virtue in her heart which I have in mouth only.  Mrs. After-day—­Oh, that’s she that was the great beauty, the mighty toast about town, that’s just come out of the small-pox; she is horribly pitted they say; I long to see her, and plague her with my condolence....  But you are sure these other ladies suspect not in the least that I know of their coming?

“TAT.  No, dear madam, they are to ask for me.