“Faith! it can’t be too soon for me. Madame, the dear creature, hath ‘spy’ writ large upon her brain. Her tremors and her apprehensions would be ridiculous, were they not tiresome. There is no listening to reason with her. She is convinced she is surrounded by secret agents of the royalty she hath provoked. She lives in hourly fear of assassination for herself, and abduction for her sacred charge. One day she will do this, another, that; bury herself and hers in the caves of Staffa; return to the protection of her illustrious protector. That, I warrant, will be the end o’t. But there is some difficulty in the way--some imperative necessity, as I understand, that forewarning of her return be conveyed to monsieur the duke; and she hath no messenger that she can trust to the task--no prodromos to signal her approach. So day by day she grows more distraught, until I know not what to say for counsel or comfort.” There was some odd quality in the stealth with which he regarded the young man as he spoke. He saw his words had so far taken effect that Ned was fallen into a musing fit where he sat by the bed. He was too finished an artist in practical joking to ruin the promise of a situation by over-haste. He would drop a suggestion on “kind” soil and leave it to germinate. He knew that a seed thumbed in too deep is often choked from sprouting. So, having deposited his grain, he took means to dismiss his subject--in the double sense. “Well,” he said, “and that is all that’s to remark on’t. But I was to have put you twenty questions when I asked you to come up: as to the ball, and your enjoyment of it; and as to how far you was satisfied I had held to my share of the compact. Sir, I claim you responsible at least for the state of my head this morning.” He turned over on his pillow with a moan. “Zounds!” said he, “small-beer, I find, is like small-talk for deadening one’s faculties. I must commit myself to good Mr Pig-curer, if I would save my bacon.” Ned secretly thought this a poor capping of a fairly respectable witticism. He would have valued the joke even less as a spontaneous effusion, could he have examined its essays scribbled over the scrap of paper on which Mr Sheridan had been writing before he entered: “Physicians and pork-butchers: both cure by killing: like all butchers, they must kill to cure,” and so on, and so on. However, he got to his feet immediately and, apologising for his intrusion, made his adieux and left the invalid to his aching cogitations.