She gave a little staccato shriek of mockery, and attacked him without hesitation. The monkey still perched on her shoulder. With her third pass, Ned felt that his life was in the hands of a consummate _tireuse_; her fourth took him clean through the fleshy part of the right shoulder. Madame withdrew and lowered the red lance, that dropped a little crimson on the carpet, like an overcharged pen. The tipsy old lord had scrambled to his feet. His inflamed eyes seemed to gutter like expiring dips. He yelled out oaths and blasphemy. “Kill him!” he shrieked: “I hate him--do you hear! kill him!” Ned, reeling a little, and clutching at a chair-back, dimly wondered if this were indeed but a villainous plot to rid his kinsman of a detested incubus. He felt powerless and sick, but madame’s voice reassured him. “Bah!” she cried gruffly, “you are very tipsy indeed. Hold your tongue, and drink some more wine!” He was conscious, then, of her near neighbourhood; of the fact that she was binding up his arm. “It is leetle--but enough,” he heard her mutter. Then she looked over to where my lord sat glowering and collapsed. “A coach, if you please!” she said peremptorily. “It must not arrive that he pass the night heere in your house.” The uncle laughed inanely. “What!” he said, “d’ye think I should finish him and put the blame on--on another? Take him to the devil, if you will.” “No,” said she, “but I weel convey’a heem to his lodgings out of the devil’s way.” CHAPTER XIX. Of so wanton and inexplicable a nature had been the assault committed on him, that for some three days succeeding it Ned could have fancied himself lying rather in a stupor of amazement than in the semi-consciousness engendered of a certain degree of pain and fever. His _contretemps_ with his uncle; the latter’s more than usually uncompromising attitude of offence towards him; most of all, the strange vision of madame, with her obvious intention to insult and disable him,--all this in the retrospect inclined him to consider himself the late victim of a delirium that was reflex to the hideous pictures painted in Paris upon his brain. But, on the fourth morning of his retirement, finding himself awake to the humour of the situation, he knew that his distemper was retreating, and that he might claim himself for a convalescent. “Astonishment is a good febrifuge,” he thought. “How long have I lain in it, as in a cooling bath?” And it is indeed strange how blessed an exorcist of pain is absorbing wonder. Not knowledge of drugs for the body but of drugs for the mind shall some day perhaps redeem the world from suffering: the Theatre of Variety, not of the hospital, be the Avalon of the maimed and the smitten. He had no memory as to who--if anybody--had visited him during the course of his fever. “But, no doubt,” he thought, “this moderate blood-letting has very timely rectified a bad effusion to my brain, and madame is my unconscious physician.”