"Well, my dear madam—I know it is repugnant to you—very repugnant," interrupted the physician in a calmly remonstrative tone: "but the world cannot afford to lose so excellent a member of society as yourself. Consider your friends, my dear madam—exert yourself on their account. Triumph over these little aversions to wine and brandy—and take them as medicines, in which sense do I offer them. And now, my dear madam, I will write you out a leetle prescription. You had better get it made up as usual at Timmins and Jakes, in Bond Street. I have no interest in recommending them, you know—not the slightest;—but I am sure their drugs are good, my dear madam."
Which was as much as to imply that the drugs of other chemists were not good; and we may here observe that the disinterested physician merely received a thousand a-year from Messrs. Timmins and Jakes for recommending all his patients to send his prescriptions to their shop.
The doctor wrote some professional hieroglyphics upon a slip of paper, and scrawled at the bottom something which would have represented the name of Snooks, or Brown, or Thompson, quite as well as it did Wagtail.
He then rose, received from Mrs. Slingsby his fee neatly wrapped up in a piece of tissue paper, and took his departure, holding his stick to his nose all the way down stairs.
The afternoon passed away somewhat tediously for Rosamond; and when dinner was placed on the table, Mrs. Slingsby contrived to do honour to the boiled fowls; and though she held forth at considerable length upon her abhorrence for Port wine, she managed to swallow four glasses of the generous juice in a manner which Rosamond considered highly creditable to her moral courage, seeing how much she detested it.
Shortly after dinner, which was served in the drawing-room, Sir Henry Courtenay made his appearance.
The baronet's eyes sparkled with delight when he beheld his intended victim at the pious lady's abode, and looking more sweetly beautiful—more divinely interesting than she had ever yet appeared to him. The blood boiled in his veins, as his glances rapidly swept her slight but symmetrical form, and as he thought within the recesses of his own iniquitous heart, "This night thou shall become mine!"
It will be remembered that, during the last few days of her previous sojourn at Mrs. Slingsby's abode, Rosamond had been taught to form a very high opinion of the baronet; but the pious lady had not gone so far as to instil any voluptuous sentiment into the mind of the young maiden. Thus, when the baronet, on the occasion of his visits to Torrens Cottage, had addressed her in a somewhat equivocal manner, she did not comprehend him; and hence Sir Henry's reproach against Mrs. Slingsby, "that she was but an indifferent tutoress."
Still Rosamond was predisposed to admire the baronet's character, as it had been represented to her by Mrs. Slingsby; and she was by no means sorry that he had arrived to vary the monotony of the evening.
He exerted all his conversational powers to please her; and she could not conceal from herself the delight which she experienced in listening to those outpourings of a well-informed mind and a richly cultivated intellect.