The dinner-hour roused him.  He was cheerful at dinner; he reverted to the idea of the cheap little house in France; he smirked and simpered; and talked French to Mrs. Lecount, while the house-maid and Louisa waited, turn and turn about, under protest.  When dinner was over, he returned to his comfortable chair before the fire, and Mrs. Lecount followed him.  He resumed the conversation—­which meant, in his case, repeating his questions.  But he was not so quick and ready with them as he had been earlier in the day.  They began to flag—­they continued, at longer and longer intervals—­they ceased altogether.  Toward nine o’clock he fell asleep again.

It was not a quiet sleep this time.  He muttered, and ground his teeth, and rolled his head from side to side of the chair.  Mrs. Lecount purposely made noise enough to rouse him.  He woke, with a vacant eye and a flushed cheek.  He walked about the room restlessly, with a new idea in his mind—­the idea of writing a terrible letter; a letter of eternal farewell to his wife.  How was it to be written?  In what language should he express his feelings?  The powers of Shakespeare himself would be unequal to the emergency!  He had been the victim of an outrage entirely without parallel.  A wretch had crept into his bosom!  A viper had hidden herself at his fireside!  Where could words be found to brand her with the infamy she deserved?  He stopped, with a suffocating sense in him of his own impotent rage—­he stopped, and shook his fist tremulously in the empty air.

Mrs. Lecount interfered with an energy and a resolution inspired by serious alarm.  After the heavy strain that had been laid on his weakness already, such an outbreak of passionate agitation as was now bursting from him might be the destruction of his rest that night and of his strength to travel the next day.  With infinite difficulty, with endless promises to return to the subject, and to advise him about it in the morning, she prevailed on him, at last, to go upstairs and compose himself for the night.  She gave him her arm to assist him.  On the way upstairs his attention, to her great relief, became suddenly absorbed by a new fancy.  He remembered a certain warm and comfortable mixture of wine, eggs, sugar, and spices, which she had often been accustomed to make for him in former times, and which he thought he should relish exceedingly before he went to bed.  Mrs. Lecount helped him on with his dressing-gown—­then went down-stairs again to make his warm drink for him at the parlor fire.

She rang the bell and ordered the necessary ingredients for the mixture, in Noel Vanstone’s name.  The servants, with the small ingenious malice of their race, brought up the materials one by one, and kept her waiting for each of them as long as possible.  She had got the saucepan, and the spoon, and the tumbler, and the nutmeg-grater, and the wine—­but not the egg, the sugar, or the spices—­when she heard him above, walking backward and forward noisily in his room; exciting hi mself on the old subject again, beyond all doubt.