thing very superior in the
licensed victualling way--was the kind of thing that would call out the
genius of such a man as you. I hope you'll look in to see us now and
then. Sally, Sir, will be delighted I'm sure. She's extremely sorry
to lose you, Mr Richard, but a sense of her duty to society reconciles
her. An amazing creature that, sir! You'll find the money quite
correct, I think. There's a cracked window sir, but I've not made any
deduction on that account. Whenever we part with friends, Mr Richard,
let us part liberally. A delightful sentiment, sir!'

To all these rambling observations, Mr Swiveller answered not one word,
but, returning for the aquatic jacket, rolled it into a tight round
ball: looking steadily at Brass meanwhile as if he had some intention
of bowling him down with it. He only took it under his arm, however,
and marched out of the office in profound silence. When he had closed
the door, he re-opened it, stared in again for a few moments with the
same portentous gravity, and nodding his head once, in a slow and
ghost-like manner, vanished.

He paid the coachman, and turned his back on Bevis Marks, big with
great designs for the comforting of Kit's mother and the aid of Kit
himself.

But the lives of gentlemen devoted to such pleasures as Richard
Swiveller, are extremely precarious. The spiritual excitement of the
last fortnight, working upon a system affected in no slight degree by
the spirituous excitement of some years, proved a little too much for
him. That very night, Mr Richard was seized with an alarming illness,
and in twenty-four hours was stricken with a raging fever.

CHAPTER 64

Tossing to and fro upon his hot, uneasy bed; tormented by a fierce
thirst which nothing could appease; unable to find, in any change of
posture, a moment's peace or ease; and rambling, ever, through deserts
of thought where there was no resting-place, no sight or sound
suggestive of refreshment or repose, nothing but a dull eternal
weariness, with no change but the restless shiftings of his miserable
body, and the weary wandering of his mind, constant still to one
ever-present anxiety--to a sense of something left undone, of some
fearful obstacle to be surmounted, of some carking care that would not
be driven away, and which haunted the distempered brain, now in this
form, now in that, always shadowy and dim, but recognisable for the
same phantom in every shape it took: darkening every vi