At one moment, it was about half-past four in the morning,--much at the time when Demaine, seventy miles away, upon the bosom of the ocean, had woken to see the sun--his predecessor in the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry (and still the titular holder of that office) had started suddenly up in bed, and violently denounced a man with an Austrian name as having cheated him by obtaining prior information upon the Budget. He asked rapidly in his mania why Consols had gone up in the first week of April, and would not be pacified until his wife, with the tact that is born of affection, had assumed the rôle of the unpleasing foreigner and had confessed all. Then and then only was he pacified and fell into the first true sleep he had enjoyed for twenty-four hours. He slept until eleven, and she, brave woman that she was, snatched some little sleep at his side, but only upon the edge of sleep as it were, waking at any moment to shield him from the consequences of his disease. When he woke she herself made it her duty to go downstairs and fetch him his breakfast, but though his repose had recruited his body, his dear mind was still unhinged. He would have it that the Royal Family when they invested in some concern were not registered under their true names, and he began a long wild rambling harangue about the death duties and some new story about yet another outlandish name, and the insufficiency of the taxes for which it was responsible. The whole thing was described in a manner so clear and sensible as added to the horror of the contrast between his sanity and that other dreadful mood. By noon, still lying in his bed, he was contrasting to her wearied ear the cost of the Tubes in London as against those in Paris, and making jokes about “boring through the London clay.” He went on to ask why a friend of his had drawn his salary as a Minister for some little time after his death, and suddenly went off at a tangent upon the noble self-sacrifice of Lord Axton in exiling himself to a tropic clime, threatening that unfortunate peer with certain bankruptcy and possible imprisonment unless a report upon the Bitsu Marsh were favourable. Then for a blessed half-hour he was silent. At the end of it he called for a pen and paper, and wrote a number of short notes. Luckily he gave them to her to be posted; she read but a few, and with trembling hands she burned them all, even the stamps, though she knew how particular he had been in the old days on that detail. He dressed and came down. She persuaded him--oh how lovingly,--to sit in his favourite room overlooking the Park. She forgot that it overlooked the crowded throng, and from close upon one until late in the afternoon this devoted angel clung to him while he poured out meaningless denunciations of all his world, up hill and down dale, relieved from time to time (a relief to him but not to her) by a sudden throwing up of the window, and an address to the passers-by.