Summoning the waiter once more, he ordered breakfast, and a place to be secured for him in the London coach. All was done according to his desire, with prompt activity; and, by a quarter after ten, Henry Beauchamp was on his way to London, in the inside of a hot stage-coach, crammed full of humanity; while his own feelings consisted of a compound of intense mental anxiety, and all those horrible corporeal sensations which precede a violent attack of fever. His hands and his head burned like living coals; his feet were as cold as ice; and a faint sort of chilly shiverings thrilled over all his frame, alternating with a degree of heat that became sometimes intolerable. He endured all this with firm determination for six mortal hours; but at length he found that nature would bear no more, and that he must stop. At Hartford Bridge, then, where his name and station in society were well known, from his having often spent a night in that most pleasant of all country inns--the White Lion--he desired the coachman to put him down, and entered the house. His appearance was so altered, that the old waiter did not recognize him for a moment; but the moment that he did so, he declared, upon his word then, that Major Beauchamp must be ill, in which assertion Beauchamp found strong reason within his own bosom to coincide. The result, therefore, was, that, before the sixth day after he had been carried from Emberton was completely over, Henry Beauchamp was in bed, with an apothecary gently compressing his wrist on one side, and a waiter holding the candle on the other. After innumerable questions, to all of which the young gentleman answered like a lamb--which showed how ill he was--the apothecary declared him in a state of fever, and bled him considerably. By this depletion he certainly felt relieved for the time, and the next morning was not at all worse than he had been the day before. Nevertheless, he was troubled with no inclination to rise; and the landlord asked anxiously of the man of medicine whether he conceived his patient to be in any danger, as he was aware that the gentleman had relations of high rank in London, whom he might wish to write to, if he knew himself in precarious circumstances.