‘I shall hold you responsible!’ Mr. Fishwick cried passionately.  ’I consider this a most mysterious illness.  I repeat, I—­’

But apparently that was the last straw.  ‘Mysterious?’ the doctor cried, his face purple with indignation.  ’Leave the room, sir!  You are not sane, sir!  By God, you ought to be shut up, sir!  You ought not to be allowed to go about.  Do you think that you are the only person who wants to see His Majesty’s Minister?  Here is a courier come to-day from His Grace the Duke of Grafton, and to-morrow there will be a score, and a king’s messenger from His Majesty among them—­and all this trouble is given by a miserable, little, paltry, petti—­Begone, sir, before I say too much!’ he continued trembling with anger.  And then to the servant, ’John, the door! the door!  And see that this person does not trouble me again.  Be good enough to communicate in writing, sir, if you have anything to say.’

With which poor Mr. Fishwick was hustled out, protesting but not convinced.  It is seldom the better side of human nature that lawyers see; nor is an attorney’s office, or a barrister’s chamber, the soil in which a luxuriant crop of confidence is grown.  In common with many persons of warm feelings, but narrow education, Mr. Fishwick was ready to believe on the smallest evidence—­or on no evidence at all—­that the rich and powerful were leagued against his client; that justice, if he were not very sharp, would be denied him; that the heavy purse had a knack of outweighing the righteous cause, even in England and in the eighteenth century.  And the fact that all his hopes were staked on this case, that all his resources were embarked in it, that it had fallen, as it were, from heaven into his hands—­wherefore the greater the pity if things went amiss—­rendered him peculiarly captious and impracticable.  After this every day, nay, every hour, that passed without bringing him to Lord Chatham’s presence augmented his suspense and doubled his anxiety.  To be put off, not one day, but two days, three days—­what might not happen in three days!—­was a thing intolerable, insufferable; a thing to bring the heavens down in pity on his head!  What wonder if he rebelled hourly; and being routed, as we have seen him routed, muttered dark hints in Julia’s ear, and, snubbed in that quarter also, had no resource but to shut himself up in his sleeping-place, and there brood miserably over his suspicions and surmises?

Even when the lapse of twenty-four hours brought the swarm of couriers, messengers, and expresses which Dr. Addington had foretold; when the High Street of Marlborough—­a name henceforth written on the page of history—­became but a slowly moving line of coaches and chariots bearing the select of the county to wait on the great Minister; when the little town itself began to throb with unusual life, and to take on airs of fashion, by reason of the crowd that lay in it; when the Duke of Grafton himself was reported to be but a stage distant, and there detained