from the sick-room. They held the young mill-owner captive, and hardly let the air breathe or the sun shine on him.

Mr. MacTurk, the surgeon, to whom Moore’s case had been committed, pronounced his wound of a dangerous, but, he trusted, not of a hopeless character. At first he wished to place with him a nurse of his own selection; but this neither Mrs. Yorke nor Hortense would hear of; they promised faithful observance of directions. He was left, therefore, for the present, in their hands.

Doubtless they executed the trust to the best of their ability, but something got wrong: the bandages were displaced, or tampered with; great loss of blood followed. MacTurk, being summoned, came with steed afoam. He was one of those surgeons whom it is dangerous to vex: abrupt in his best moods; in his worst, savage. On seeing Moore’s state, he relieved his feelings by a little flowery language, with which it is not necessary to strew the present page. A bouquet of two of the choicest blossoms fell on the unperturbed head of one Mr. Graves, a stony young assistant he usually carried about with him; with a second nosegay he gifted another young gentleman in his train—an interesting facsimile of himself, being, indeed, his own son; but the full corbeille of blushing bloom fell to the lot of meddling womankind en masse.

For the best part of one winter night himself and satellites were busied about Moore. There, at his bedside, shut up alone with him in his chamber, they wrought and wrangled over his exhausted frame. They three were on one side of the bed, and Death on the other. The conflict was sharp. It lasted till day broke, when the balance between the belligerents seemed so equal that both parties might have claimed the victory.

At dawn Graves and young MacTurk were left in charge of the patient, while the senior went himself in search of additional strength, and secured it in the person of Mrs. Horsfall, the best nurse on his staff. To this woman he gave Moore in charge, with the sternest injunctions respecting the responsibility laid on her shoulders. She took this responsibility stolidly, as she did also the easy-chair at the bed-head. That moment she began her reign.

Mrs. Horsfall had one virtue: orders received from MacTurk she obeyed to the letter—the Ten Commandments were less binding in her eyes than her surgeon’s dictum. In other respects she was no woman, but a dragon. Hortense Moore fell effaced before her; Mrs. Yorke withdrew crushed; yet both these women were personages of some dignity in their own estimation, and of some bulk in the estimation of others. Perfectly cowed by the breadth, the height, the bone, and the brawn of Mrs. Horsfall, they retreated to the back-parlour. She, for her part, sat upstairs when she liked, and downstairs when she preferred it. She took her dram three times a day, and her pipe of tobacco four times.

As to Moore, no one now ventured to inquire about him. Mrs. Horsfall had him at dry-nurse. It was she who was to do for him, and the general conjecture now ran that she did for him accordingly.

Morning and evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon’s eyes. He regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young MacTurk—Moore’s sole other visitors —contemplated him in the light in which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of the dissecting-room at Stilbro’ Infirmary.

Robert Moore had a pleasant time of it—in pain; in danger; too weak to move almost too weak to speak; a sort of giantess his keeper; the three surgeons his sole society. Thus he lay through of diminishing days and lengthening nights of the whole drear month of November.

In the commencement of his captivity, Moore used feebly to resist Mrs. Horsfall. He hated the sight of her rough bulk, and dreaded the contact of her hard hands, but she taught him docility in a trice. She made no account whatever of his six feet, his manly thews and sinews—she turned him as his bed as another woman would have turned a baby in its cradle. When he was good she addressed him as ‘my


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