‘A man?’

‘It was Mr. Thomasson.’

Her ladyship’s hands went up.  Perhaps she remembered that but for her the tutor would not have been there.  Then ’Sink you!  I wish he had flogged you all!’ she shrieked, and, turning stiffly, she went mumbling and cursing down the stairs, the lace lappets of her head trembling, and her gold-headed cane now thumping the floor, now waving uncertainly in the air.

* * * * *

A quarter of an hour earlier, in the apartments for which Mr. Fishwick was bound when her ladyship intercepted him, two men stood talking at a window.  The room was the best in the Castle Inn—­a lofty panelled chamber with a southern aspect looking upon the smooth sward and sweet-briar hedges of Lady Hertford’s terrace, and commanding beyond these a distant view of the wooded slopes of Savernake.  The men spoke in subdued tones, and more than once looked towards the door of an adjacent room, as if they feared to disturb some one.

‘My dear Sir George,’ the elder said, after he had listened patiently to a lengthy relation, in the course of which he took snuff a dozen times, ‘your mind is quite made up, I suppose?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Well, it is a remarkable series of events; a—­most remarkable series,’ Dr. Addington answered with professional gravity.  ’And certainly, if the lady is all you paint her—­and she seems to set you young bloods on fire—­no ending could well be more satisfactory.  With the addition of a comfortable place in the Stamps or the Pipe Office, if we can take his lordship the right way—­it should do.  It should do handsomely.  But’, with a keen glance at his companion, ’even without that—­you know that he is still far from well?’

‘I know that all the world is of one of two opinions,’ Sir George answered, smiling.  ’The first, that his lordship ails nothing save politically; the other, that he is at death’s door and will not have it known.’

The physician shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.  ‘Neither is true,’ he said.  ’The simple fact is, he has the gout; and the gout is an odd thing, Sir George, as you’ll know one of these days,’ with another sharp glance at his companion.  ‘It flies here and there, and everywhere.’

‘And where is it now?’ Soane asked innocently.

‘It has gone to his head,’ Addington answered, in a tone so studiously jejune that Sir George glanced at him.  The doctor, however, appeared unaware of the look, and merely continued:  ’So, if he does not take things quite as you wish, Sir George, you’ll—­but here his lordship comes!’