her sufferings, and
restore her to that health without which the riches she apparently was
mistress of, could be of small avail in rendering her happy. She
appeared grateful for the sentiments I expressed; and proceeded to tell
me, still with the same struggling difficulty of utterance, arising from
her extreme weakness, that she was the wife of Colonel P----, the
proprietor of the mansion into which I had been thus secretly
introduced, for reasons she would explain in the course of her
narrative. She had been married to her husband, she proceeded, in the
East Indies, of which country she was a native; and, having succeeded
to a large fortune on the death of her father, had given it all freely
without bond, contract, or settlement, to her husband, whom she loved,
honoured, and worshipped, beyond all earthly beings, and with an ardour
which had never abated from the first moment she had become his wife.
Nor was the affection limited to one side of the house; for she was
more than satisfied that her lord and master--grateful, no doubt, for
the rank, honour, riches, and independence to which she had raised
him--loved her with an affection at least equal to her own. But all
these advantages (and she sighed deeply as she proceeded) were of little
consequence to the production of happiness, if the greatest of all
blessings, health, were denied to the possessor; and that too she had
enjoyed, uninterruptedly, until about a month previously, when she was
seized with an illness, the nature of which she could not comprehend;
and which, notwithstanding all the anxious efforts of her husband, had
continued unabated to that hour.

She paused, and seemed much exhausted by the struggle she made to let
me thus far into her history. The concluding part of her statement,
combined with the still unexplained secrecy of my call, surprised me,
and defied my powers of penetration. This lady had been dangerously ill
for a month, during all which time no medical man had been called to
her aid; and even now, when her body was attenuated, and her strength
exhausted to the uttermost, professional assistance had been introduced
into the house by stealth, as if it were against the laws to ameliorate
human sufferings by curing diseases. This apparent anomaly in human
conduct struck me so forcibly that I could not refrain from asking the
patient, even before she recovered strength enough to answer me, what
was her or her husband's reason for not calli