When Sturk heard in the morning that the blow was actually struck, he jumped out of bed, and was taken with a great shivering fit, sitting on the side of it.  Little Mrs. Sturk, as white as her nightcap with terror, was yet decisive in emergency, and bethought her of the brandy bottle, two glasses from which the doctor swallowed before his teeth gave over chattering, and a more natural tint returned to his blue face.

‘Oh!  Barney, dear, are we ruined?’ faltered poor little Mrs. Sturk.

‘Ruined, indeed!’ cried Sturk, with an oath, ‘Come in here.’  He thought his study was on the same floor with his bed-room, as it had been in old times in their house in Limerick, ten or twelve years before.

‘That’s the nursery, Barney, dear,’ she said, thinking, in the midst of the horror, like a true mother, of the children’s sleep.

Then he remembered and ran down to the study, and pulled out a sheaf of bills and promissory notes, and renewals thereof, making a very respectable show.

‘Ruined, indeed!’ he cried, hoarsely, talking to his poor little wife in the tones and with the ferocity which the image of Nutter; with which his brain was filled, called up.  ’Look, I say, here’s one fellow owes me that—­and that—­and that—­and there—­there’s a dozen in that by another—­there’s two more sets there pinned together—­and here’s an account of them all—­two thousand two hundred—­and you may say three hundred—­two thousand three hundred—­owed me here; and that miscreant won’t give me a day.’

‘Is it the rent, Barney?’

‘The rent?  To be sure; what else should it be?’ shouted the doctor, with a stamp.

And so pale little Mrs. Sturk stole out of the room, as her lord with bitter mutterings pitched his treasure of bad bills back again into the escritoire:  and she heard him slam the study door and run down stairs to browbeat and curse the men in the hall, for he had lost his head somewhat, between panic and fury.  He was in his stockings and slippers, with an old flowered silk dressing-gown, and nothing more but his shirt, and looked, they said, like a madman.  One of the fellows was smoking, and Sturk snatched the pipe from his mouth, and stamped it to atoms on the floor, roaring at them to know what the ——­ brought them there; and without a pause for an answer, thundered, ’And I suppose you’ll not let me take my box of instruments out of the house—­mind, it’s worth fifty pounds; and curse me, if one of our men dies for want of them in hospital, I’ll indict you both, and your employer along with you, for murder!’ And so he railed on, till his voice failed him with a sort of choking, and there was a humming in his ears, and a sort of numbness in his head, and he thought he was going to have a fit; and then up the stairs he went again, and into his study, and resolved to have Nutter out—­and it flashed upon him that he’d say, ‘Pay the rent first;’ and then—­what next? why he’d post him all over Dublin, and Chapelizod, and Leixlip, where the Lord Lieutenant and Court were.