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 body ill-will, thank God, and Mr Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he’d better have let me die—if—if"

“I will meet Mr Wrench here, then, shall I?” said Lydgate, really believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case of this kind.

“Pray make that arrangement, Mr Lydgate,” said Rosamond, coming to her mother’s aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.

When Mr Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did not care if he never came into his house again. Lydgate should go on now, whether Wrench liked it or not. It was no joke to have fever in the house. Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on Thursday. And Pritchard needn’t get up any wine: brandy was the best thing against infection. “I shall drink brandy,” added Mr Vincy emphatically—as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing with blank-cartridges. “He’s an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred. He’d need have some luck by-and-by to make up for all this—else I don’t know who’d have an eldest son.”

“Don’t say so, Vincy,” said the mother, with a quivering lip, “if you don’t want him to be taken from me.”

“It will worret you to death, Lucy; that I can see,” said Mr Vincy, more mildly. “However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter.” (What Mr Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about his—the Mayor's—family.) “I’m the last man to give in to the cry about new doctors or new parsons, either—whether they’re Bulstrode’s men or not. But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will.”

Wrench did not take it at all well. Lydgate was as polite as he could be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand. Country practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point of honour; and Mr Wrench was one of the most irritable among them. He did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was somewhat tried on the occasion. He had to hear Mrs Vincy say—

“Oh, Mr Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?—To go away, and never to come again! And my boy might have been stretched a corpse!”

Mr Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection, and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.

“I’ll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke,” said the Mayor, who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and now broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.—“To let fever get unawares into a house like this. There are some things that ought to be actionable, and are not so—that’s my opinion.”

But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being