d.

Lady Bassett controlled her tears at parting as well as she could.

Mr. Coyne had slyly hid himself, but emerged when she came down to the
carriage, and she shook him warmly by the hand, and he bowed at the
door incessantly, with his face all in a pucker, till the cavalcade
dashed away.

CHAPTER XXV.

LADY BASSETT timed her next visit so that she found Dr. Suaby at home.

He received her kindly, and showed himself a master; told her Sir
Charles's was a mixed case, in which the fall, the fit, and a morbid
desire for offspring had all played their parts.

He hoped a speedy cure, but said he counted on her assistance. There
was no doubt what he meant.

Oh, for one thing, he said to her, rather slyly, "Coyne tells me you
have been good enough to supply us with a hint as to his treatment;
sedatives are opposed to his idiosyncrasy."

Lady Bassett blushed high, and said something about Dr. Willis.

"Oh, you are quite right, you and Dr. Willis; only you are not so very
conversant with that idiosyncrasy. Why have you let him smoke twenty
cigars every day of his life? the brain is accessible by other roads
than the stomach. Well, we have got him down to four cigars, and in a
month we will have him down to two. The effect of that, and exercise,
and simple food, and the absence of powerful excitements--you will see.
Do your part," said he, gayly, "we will do ours. He is the most
interesting patient in the house, and born to adorn society, though by
a concurrence of unhappy circumstances he is separated from it for a
while."

She spent the whole afternoon with Sir Charles, and they dined together
at the doctor's private table, with one or two patients who were
touched, but showed no signs of it on that occasion; for the good
doctor really acted like oil on the troubled waters.

Sir Charles and Lady Bassett corresponded, and so kept their hearts up;
but after Rolfe's hint the correspondence was rather guarded. If these
letters were read in the asylum the curious would learn that Sir
Charles was far more anxious about his wife's condition than his own;
but that these two patient persons were only waiting a certain near
event to attack Richard Bassett with accumulated fury--that smoldering
fire did not smoke by letter, but burned deep in both their sore and
heavy, but enduring, Anglo-Saxon hearts.

Lady Bassett wrote to Mr. Rolfe, thanking him again for his advice, and
telling him how it worked.

She had a ve