"Why, bless my heart! is that you or your ghost?" cried Sir Thomas, starting up from his chair and rubbing his eyes.
He had been taking forty winks surreptitiously--a little weakness in which he indulged three or four times a day, without ever permitting himself to acknowledge that he had been asleep.
Gerald, in the act of reaching a book from one of the upper shelves, turned with the volume in his hand as Kelvin and the others came into the room.
"He will be better in a little while," said Dr. Whitaker to the baronet, who had crossed the room, and was now standing, with his hands under his coat-tails and pursed-up lips, gazing down with compassionate eyes at the half-conscious man before him.
"What a wreck! What a terrible wreck!" murmured the baronet. "I--I never dreamt that he was half as bad as this."
Dr. Whitaker put something to the sick man's nostrils, which he inhaled eagerly, and presently he began to revive.
"I trust. Sir Thomas, that you will pardon my intrusion," he said, at last, speaking in a strange, husky voice, that was little more than a whisper, and was totally unlike the well-remembered voice--clear and confident--of Matthew Kelvin. "That my business here is of a very pressing kind you may well believe, when you see me thus and so attended."
"Whatever your business may be, Kelvin," said the baronet, kindly, "it is almost a pity that you did not put it off till you were a little stronger, or else that you did not send for me. I would have gone to see you willingly. You know that."
"Yes, yes; I know all you can say," said Kelvin, a little querulously. "But it was necessary that I should come here in person, and without an hour's delay."
"You don't mean to say that there's going to be a dissolution of Parliament?" cried Sir Thomas, eagerly.
"Ah! I was afraid there was no such luck," said the baronet.
"I am here on the same errand that brought Miss Deane here this morning."
"But Miss Deane has told us everything, and a queer story it is."
"She has not told you everything, Sir Thomas."
"Well, I hope there's not much more to tell. I hardly know already whether I'm topsy-turvey or how."
"You have, I presume, read the letter that I sent by Miss Deane?"
"Miss Deane gave me no letter. She told me a long rigmarole about----"