His rage was great, therefore, when three days after the duel, he awoke, missed her, and found in her place the senior bedmaker of Magdalen—­a worthy woman, learned in simples and with hands of horn, but far from beautiful.  This good person he saluted with a vigour which proved him already far on the road to recovery; and when he was tired of swearing, he wept and threw his nightcap at her.  Finally, between one and the other, and neither availing to bring back his Briseis, he fell into a fever; which, as he was kept happed up in a box-bed, in a close room, with every window shut and every draught kept off by stuffy curtains—­such was the fate of sick men then—­bade fair to postpone his recovery to a very distant date.

In this plight he sent one day for Mr. Thomasson, who had the nominal care of the young gentleman; and the tutor being brought from the club tavern in the Corn Market which he occasionally condescended to frequent, the invalid broke to him his resolution.

‘See here, Tommy,’ he said in a voice weak but vicious.  ’You have got to get her back.  I will not be poisoned by this musty old witch any longer.’

‘But if she will not come?’ said Mr. Thomasson sadly.

‘The little fool threw up the sponge when she came before,’ the patient answered, tossing restlessly.  ’And she will come again, with a little pressure.  Lord, I know the women!  So should you.’

‘She came before because—­well, I do not quite know why she came,’ Mr. Thomasson confessed.

‘Any way, you have got to get her back.’

The tutor remonstrated, ‘My dear good man,’ he said unctuously, ’you don’t think of my position.  I am a man of the world, I know—­’

‘All of it, my Macaroni!’

‘But I cannot be—­be mixed up in such a matter as this, my dear sir.’

‘All the same, you have got to get her,’ was the stubborn answer.  ’Or I write to my lady and tell her you kept mum about my wound.  And you will not like that, my tulip.’

On that point he was right; for if there was a person in the world of whom Mr. Thomasson stood in especial awe, it was of Lady Dunborough.  My lord, the author of ‘Pomaria Britannica’ and ’The Elegant Art of Pomiculture as applied to Landscape Gardening,’ was a quantity he could safely neglect.  Beyond his yew-walks and his orchards his lordship was a cipher.  He had proved too respectable even for the peerage; and of late had cheerfully resigned all his affairs into the hands of his wife, formerly the Lady Michal M’Intosh, a penniless beauty, with the pride of a Scotchwoman and the temper of a Hervey.  Her enemies said that my lady had tripped in the merry days of George the Second, and now made up for past easiness by present hardness.  Her friends—­but it must be confessed her ladyship had no friends.

Be that as it might, Mr. Thomasson had refrained from summoning her to her son’s bedside; partly because the surgeons had quickly pronounced the wound a trifle, much more because the little he had seen of her ladyship had left him no taste to see more.  He knew, however, that the omission would weigh heavily against him were it known; and as he had hopes from my lady’s aristocratic connections, and need in certain difficulties of all the aid he could muster, he found the threat not one to be sneezed at.  His laugh betrayed this.