After this Mr. Topsparkle had a little conversation with his ancient, M. Fétis, who, in London, oscillated between Soho Square and his own particular establishment in Poland Street, where he had a plump French wife, who carried on the business in his absence: a native of Périgord, with a fine eye and nose for truffles, and who was said to cook certain dishes better than any _chef_ at the Court end of the town. M. Fétis undertook to keep his eye on her ladyship. She was not the first sultana he had guarded for his sultan. 'Twas he who met Mr. Topsparkle as he alighted from his chair after the Guildhall dinner, with the intelligence that Lady Judith had recovered her spirits and had gone to Lady Townley's assembly. "Has she had any visitors since I went out?" asked Topsparkle. "Only Mr. Durnford. He came at dusk and stayed about half an hour." "_About_ half an hour!" echoed his master testily. "You have a watch, sir, and might have timed the gentleman accurately." Topsparkle had his wig recombed and his complexion revived before he went on to Golden Square, and appeared there as white as Lord Hervey, and radiant with smiles. "How our City Croesus grins!" exclaimed Pulteney to a friend, "and what a death's-head grin it is! 'Quin et Ixion Tityosque vultu Risit invito--' One could imagine a shade in Tartarus with just such a ghastly smile. And how lovely his young wife looks to-night, lovely enough to keep that poor old atomy in perpetual torment!" CHAPTER XI. "AND WE SHALL FADE, AND LEAVE OUR TASK UNDONE." Lavendale stayed at his Surrey manor for more than a month, seeing no one but his old Italian friend and the servants who waited upon him, and never once going beyond the boundary of his own domain. For some days after his interview with Herrick Durnford he existed in a kind of apathy, interested in nothing, but living for the most part in his own chamber, brooding dreamily upon that luminous form which had shone upon him out of the midnight shadows, and that spirit voice which had seemed to him so familiar and yet so strange. In every syllable he had recognised his mother's tones, and in that faint phantasmal semblance of life he had beheld the outline of his mother's graceful figure and classic head. Not for an instant did he doubt that his mother's shade had been with him in the room where so much of their united lives had been spent, or that the warning of his early doom had been the emanation of his mother's mind.