Then she recalled her manners. “But I’m gansing-gay to see your honour so brave,” she said, with a curtsey. “And I’m vastly obliged to you, ma’am,” said Ned. “And nobody has come near me in my sickness, I understand, but the lady?” “Only the lady, sir.” “And, now, who _is_ the lady?” “But Madame d’Eon, sir, at your sairveece,” said a voice at the door. Ned fell flat on his back. A formless suspicion, that had rankled in him like an unextracted thorn ever since he had received that prick in the shoulder, suddenly revealed itself a definite shape. After a minute or two he raised his head from the pillow and looked cautiously around. “Oh!” he exclaimed, and dropped it again. Husband and wife were gone, the room door was closed, and at his bed-side, monkey on wrist, sat the strange lady who had been the very active cause of his discomfiture. “D’Eon, did you say?” he murmured. “Veritably,” she replied serenely. “Oh! the----” “Exactly: the Chevalière Charlotte-Genevieve-Louise-Augusta-Andrée-Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont.” “The chevalière!” said Ned faintly. “Or chevalier,” she answered, with a very pleasant laugh. He raised himself determinedly on his elbow and scrutinised his visitor. He saw beside him a comfortable, motherly looking creature, apparently some sixty years of age, with a sort of Dutch-cap on her head topped by a falling hat, and fat white curls rolled forward from the nape of her neck. Her face, sloping down from the forehead and up from the throat, came as it were to a sharpish prow at the tip of the nose. Its expression was of a rather mechanical humour, and the eyes seemed deliberately unspeculative. Only the mouth, looking lipless as a lizard’s, was a determined feature. For the rest, in dress and manner, she appeared the very antithesis of the loud and truculent trollop who had thrust a quarrel upon, and a sword into him, three nights ago. And this was the famous chevalier, the enigma, the epicene, upon the question of whose sex the accumulated erudition of a King’s Bench had once been brought to bear--with indefinite result. This was the hermaphrodite dragoon and lady-in-waiting; the author, the plenipotentiary, and at the last, in this year of grace, the astonishing _tireuse-d’armes_, who had excelled, on their own ground, the Professors St George and M. Angelo, and who now replenished one pocket of her purse by giving lessons in the admirable art of fencing. And, at this point of his cogitations, Mr Murk said-- “The chevalier is at least a wonderful actress.” Thereat madame chirred out a little indulgent laugh. “It is well said!” she cried. “Monsieur is _un homme d’esprit_.” “And I take no shame,” said Ned, “to have let her in under my guard.” She looked at the young man seriously. “The shame was mine, _mon petit_--the shame of the necessity was mine to wound you at all.” “You had not intended to kill me, then? It was not plotted with my lord?” She flushed, actually--this player of many parts.