“Fees?” poor Mannering said, with a bewildered consciousness; and next morning began to ask when he could go back to the Museum. Fortunately, all ideas were dim in that floating weakness amid the sensations of a man coming back to life. Convalescence is sweet in youth; but it is not sweet when a man whose life is already waning comes back out of the utter prostration of disease into the lesser but more conscious ills of common existence. Presently he began to look at the luxuries with which he was surrounded, and the attendants who watched over him, with alarm. “Look here, Roland, I can’t afford all this. You must put a stop to all this,” he said. “We can’t be economical about getting well, my dear fellow,” said the doctor. “That’s the last thing to save money on.” “But I haven’t got it! One can’t spend what one hasn’t got,” cried the sick man. It is needless to say that his progress was retarded, and the indispensable economies postponed, by this new invasion of those cares which are to the mind what the drainage which Dr. Vereker alone believed in is to the body. “Never mind, father,” Dora said in her ignorance; “it will all come right.” “Right? How is it to come right? Take that stuff away. Send these nurses away. I can’t afford it. Do you hear me? I cannot afford it!” he began to cry night and day. CHAPTER VIII. Mr. Mannering’s convalescence was worse than his illness had been to the house in Bloomsbury. Mrs. Simcox’s weekly bill fell by chance into the patient’s hands, and its items filled him with horror. When a man is himself painfully supported on cups of soup and wings of chicken, the details of roast lamb for the day-nurse’s dinner, and bacon and eggs for the night-nurse’s breakfast, take an exaggerated magnitude. And Mrs. Simcox was very conscientious, putting down even the parsley and the mint which were necessary for these meals. This bill put back the patient’s recovery for a week, and prolonged the expenses, and brought the whole house, as Mrs. Simcox declared tearfully, on her comparatively innocent head. “For wherever’s the bill to go if not to the gentleman hisself?” cried the poor woman. “He’s sittin’ up every day, and gettin’ on famous, by what I hears. And he always did like to see ’is own bills, did Mr. Mannering: and what’s a little bit of a thing like Miss Dora to go to, to make her understand money? Lord bless you! she don’t spend a shilling in a week, nor knows nothing about it. And the nurses, as was always to have everything comfortable, seeing the ’ard work as they ’as, poor things. And if it was a bit o’ mint for sauce, or a leaf o’ parsley for garnish, I’d have put it in out o’ my own pocket and welcome, if I’d a thought a gentleman would go on about sich things.”