for
your fuming--I'm not going to give way. Now, look here, Gernon: you
ought to have more confidence in me, and in what I say. I don't want to
boast; but I saved your life; I saved your wife's life; and, as
aforesaid, I saved the life of that child up-stairs when it was a tiny
spark that a breath would have destroyed. I'm proud of it, you see.
Now you want to kill her, because she is here in the house of the people
you most dislike in the world--out-and-out good sort of people, and good
friends of mine, all the same. Can't help it--I must speak plain. This
is a case where plain speaking is necessary, so you need not fling
about. You must sink all these family quarrels, and thank Heaven that
the poor child was brought here, where there was a clever, sensible
woman like Mrs Norton to take the first steps towards warding off
fever."

"But, surely, Challen," exclaimed Sir Murray, deprecatingly now, "with
plenty of wrapping, and the carriage!"

"My good man," cried the doctor, now thoroughly angry, "if you will be
obstinate, and want her to have plenty of wrapping, go and fetch a lead
coffin, and if she is to go in a carriage, send old McCray over to
Marshton for Downing's hearse. It will be the most sensible thing you
can do; for she will be dead before she gets home, or soon after. What
the deuce is the use of your talking? Do you think I want her to stay
here, or that I take two straws' worth of interest in your confounded
affairs and squabbles? That child's life is the first consideration. I
won't put up with it, Gernon--I won't indeed. How dare you interfere
and want to meddle with things which you don't understand? That child's
constitution is not a political matter for you to meddle with. Why,
confound you, sir, here we have just got her into as lovely a
perspiration as ever I saw upon a human subject! There's the threatened
fever evaporating, as it were, from her system, and she sleeping
gloriously, when you must come in with your family pride, and want to
destroy all that I have done! I tell you what it is--"

"My dear Challen," exclaimed Sir Murray, "I don't want to upset your
arrangements. I only thought--"

"Confound you, sir! how dare you to think, here, in a case of life and
death? It's a piece of consequential, confounded, titled presumption--
that's what it is!"

There was no mistaking, either, that Mr Challen was in a professional
passion; for, as he said, "in matters of medicine he