The doctor was
sent for, and kept the inflammation down until the day before yesterday,
when it broke out again, under circumstances which I am sure you will be
sorry to hear, as I am truly sorry to write of them.
"On the date I have just mentioned--I mean the fifteenth of the
month--my master himself informed me that he had been dreadfully
disappointed by a letter received from you, which had come in the
morning from foreign parts, and had brought him bad news. He did not
tell me what the news was--but I have never, in all the years I have
passed in the admiral's service, seen him so distressingly upset, and so
unlike himself, as he was on that day. At night his uneasiness seemed
to increase. He was in such a state of irritation that he could not bear
the sound of Mr. Mazey's hard breathing outside his door, and he laid
his positive orders on the old man to go into one of the bedrooms for
that night. Mr. Mazey, to his own great regret, was of course obliged to
obey.
"Our only means of preventing the admiral from leaving his room in his
sleep, if the fit unfortunately took him, being now removed, Mr. Mazey
and I agreed to keep watch by turns through the night, sitting, with the
door ajar, in one of the empty rooms near our master's bed-chamber.
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