Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham’s order that the visitor was to stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey with him to London, doctor or no doctor.  The doctor would not hear of it.  The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning for the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully affecting his linen.  Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a mere show of reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat the bed where he lay, a gouty volcano.  Gower’s one shirt was passing through the various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on its way to negro.  His natural candour checked the downward course.  He mentioned to Mrs. Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that this article of his attire ‘was beginning to resemble London snow.’  She was amused; she promised him a change more resembling country snow.  ‘It will save me from buttoning so high up,’ he said, as he thanked her.  She then remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure:  and a reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on the side where it is tender in women, from being motherly.

In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess Livia, who had come down to see the admiral ’concerning an absurd but annoying rumour running over London.’  Gower was out for a walk.  He knew of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of his clothing.

‘But I know the man,’ said Livia.  ’Lord Fleetwood picked him up somewhere, and brought him to us.  Clever:  Why, is he here?’

‘He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.’

‘Sent by whom?’

Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor’s next visit; Mr. Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten minutes, to divert him with his talk.  She protected in this wretched manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to Admiral Baldwin at once.  Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was unheeded.

The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs—­to descend them with the knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood!  Henrietta had spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood’s hatred of the title of Dowager.  But when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear to excite him?  If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire ’one of his broadsides,’—­as they said in the family, to assert its and that might exhaust him; and there was peril in that.  And who was guilty?  Mrs. Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided.  She made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.