Just as she had done so and was assailed by an unpleasant misgiving that somebody might make a row about the destruction of these things (for everybody was so foolish and sentimental), she heard the voice of Cocky’s body-servant speaking at the door to her maid, and the maid approached her with a rather astonished face. “If you please, your Grace, his Grace is unwell: could you go to his room a moment, madam?” “Go to his room?” She was as astonished as her maid. Cocky must be very ill indeed if she were summoned to him. His chronic maladies, due to brandies and sodas and insomnia, were never even named to her. He had certainly coughed and shivered at the funeral that forenoon, and in the train the day before, but then he so often did this no one attached any importance to a little more of it or a little less. This time, however, poor Cocky, over whom Providence (or the powers of darkness) did not watch as they ought to have done, had caught something worse than a cold, standing without a hat so long in that biting March morning, in a damp and windy country churchyard, and without a drop of anything inside him, as he pathetically remarked. In the evening he was so unwell with shivering, difficulty of breathing, and pains in his head and limbs, that he could not even drink liquors and enjoy the newspaper attacks upon himself in his own rooms, but had to go to bed at ten o’clock, which he had certainly never done since his early boyhood. “Most unlucky beast in all creation I am,” he muttered as he shivered between the sheets. “Just got the ribbons between my fingers and ten to one the coach’ll land in a ditch; ditch we must all end in, eh? Worms and winding sheet and all; even Mouse’ll come to that some time. Here, you, get me some brandy and don’t stand staring, you fool.” But his valet was no fool, and instead of bringing the brandy went to another wing of the house for the doctor, who had always lived in it for many years as attendant on the deceased duke. The doctor found the new duke in a very sad state of health, with some fever and a hacking cough, which threatened to become pleuro-pneumonia and would try the slender amount of strength which the sick man possessed very dangerously; he advised that the duchess should be told. So she was told, and came across the great house looking like a Burne-Jones in her long black robes, with the fairness of her skin and hair dazzling in their contrast to her garb of woe. “Is it anything serious?” she said, in an awed voice, for she was really shocked by his appearance, and did not want him to die at this moment of his succession. “It’s skull and cross-bones business; that’s what it is,” said her husband with a groan. “Rascally east wind did it. Don’t come here; you can’t do me any good.”