Saying which, he retired to bed. Immediately afterwards Miss Sowersoft glided noiselessly in, with a huge basin of treacle-posset in one hand, and one of her own linen nightcaps, which she had been heating by the fire, in the other. This last-named article she at once proceeded to place on Mr. Palthorpe's head, and tie under his chin; because the long tabs with which it was supplied would cover his bruised face much better than any cap of his own. As Colin glanced from under the clothes he could scarcely forbear laughing, in spite of his fears, at the odd combination which, his mistress's Cupid suggested,--of a copper-coloured, black-bearded face, with the primly-starched, snowy frillings of a woman's nightcap. “Is he asleep, Sammy?” asked Miss Maria in a low whisper. “A deal faster than he deserves to be,” replied that worthy. “I will just step across, and see,” observed the lady; and accordingly she trod lightly over the floor, in order to assure herself of that fact. Colin's closed eyes, his silence, and his quick full breathing, confirmed her in the pleasing delusion; and she returned to Pale-thorpe's bedside, and deposited herself in a chair with the remark that, under those circumstances, she would sit with him a few minutes. As she gazed with admiration on the uncouth countenance of Palethorpe, set, like a picture, in the white frame of her own cap, and watched him deliberately transfer spoonful after spoonful of the posset from the basin into the ill-shaped hole in his own face, she heaved a profound sigh, which seemed one moment to inflate her bosom like a balloon, and the next to collapse it again as closely as poor Cocking's parachute. Palethorpe went on with his posset. [Illustration: 225] “Ay, dear!” she sighed again. “What 's amiss, meesis?” asked Mr. Palethorpe, as soon as the emptied basin left him at liberty to speak. “Nothing, Sammy,--nothing. Ay, dear! I'm quite well, as far as that goes,” replied Miss Maria very despondingly. “But you have summat not right, I'm sure,” persisted he. “Oh, it is of no matter!” she sighed again. “But, what is it?” he a third time asked. “It does not signify much,” she again remarked; “it will be all the same a few years hence.” “You've tired yourself to death with that mangle, I suppose?” said Palethorpe. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed in a tone of voice which betrayed some slight offence at the vulgarity of his suggestion; “it is a very different sort of mangle to that. I am sure I am mangled enough by people's indifference.” “Why, as for that,” replied Sammy, trying to exculpate himself from any charge of neglect, “you are meesis of the house, and don't want to be pressed to your meat and drink like a visiter.”