It was announced with pardonable exaggeration (but only in the daily papers whose pages we hardly recall in our hurried modern life) that Mr Burden, though still in feeble health, was able to direct his affairs from the sick room; and Cosmo did not hesitate, with a commercial courage which the future justified, to use his father’s name in several important expressions of opinion. He wrote also to the Press, above his own signature, twice within the space of a week, strongly supporting an attitude of the Directors which had been unduly criticised, and emphasising, with a fine indignation, the treachery of the unpatriotic crew who used his father’s name at a moment when the great merchant was unable to attend the meetings of the Board. Indeed, it may truly be said that, at this moment when Mr Burden’s body was most removed from the affairs of the M’Korio, his spirit was omnipresent in a way it had never been until that moment; his credit and position, which were of such incalculable advantage to that Imperial venture, were never so strongly before the public as at the moment when Cosmo, for his own wise ends, was speaking in the old man’s name. The splendid hospitality which the house at Norwood displayed at this moment was of importance equally critical. Not that the parties were large, but that this distant villa, which hitherto had seen few visitors, and those of but a humdrum sort, now received men upon whose capital or judgment, the principal affairs of our time are conducted. In a few days the public rumours of Mr Burden’s dissensions utterly died away, and the old man’s solid career became in the general estimation the pivot of the whole M’Korian scheme. So true is it that Providence does with us more than we mean! For Mr Burden, passing the days upstairs between sleeping and waking, glad that his son should be seeing something of companionship during this difficult period of his illness, would never have had the tenacity or the judgment to use his own influence as well as it was used by Cosmo for him. The strong constitution which Mr Burden had inherited, and which he had carefully preserved, stood him in good stead during the course of his little illness. Ten days after he had taken to his bed, that is, upon August 23rd, he felt himself again; he could eat heartily, he read with a clear judgment, and he might, had he not wisely deferred to the opinion of the faculty, have left the house and gone about his business. His doctors, however, with the double object of permanently curing their patient and of advancing the science they adorned, determined to defer his return to business.