“The sweetest girl?—what girl?”
“Oh, your lordship is pleased to jest with me.”
“I remember you, Doctor Shovel, whom I came to see last night with Sir Miles Lackington; I remember the punch and the songs; but I remember nothing about any girl.”
“Why, she is downstairs now, waiting for your lordship. You will come downstairs and keep your appointment.”
He spoke in a peremptory manner, as if ordering and expecting obedience.
“My appointment? Have I gone mad? It is this cursed punch of yours. My appointment?”
The Doctor gave him his coat and wig, and helped him to put them on.
“I attend your lordship. She is downstairs. Take a little more ale to clear your head: you will remember then.”
The young man drank again. The beer mounted to his brain, I suppose, because he laughed and straightened himself.
“Why, I am a man again. An appointment? No, Doctor, hang me if all the beer in your cellar will make me remember any appointment! Where is Sir Miles? He might tell me something about it. Curse all punch, I say. Yet, if the lady be downstairs, as you say, I suppose I must have made some sort of appointment. Let me see her, at any rate. It will be easy to—to——” here he reeled, and caught hold of the Doctor’s hand.