In a very short time the news was common property, and Mr. Wilks,
appearing to his neighbours in an entirely new character, was besieged
for information.
His own friends were the most tiresome, their open admiration of his
lawlessness and their readiness to trace other mysterious disappearances
to his agency being particularly galling to a man whose respectability
formed his most cherished possession. Other people regarded the affair
as a joke, and he sat gazing round-eyed one evening at the Two Schooners
at the insensible figures of three men who had each had a modest
half-pint at his expense. It was a pretty conceit and well played, but
the steward, owing to the frenzied efforts of one of the sleeper whom he
had awakened with a quart pot, did not stay to admire it. He finished
up the evening at the Chequers, and after getting wet through on the way
home fell asleep in his wet clothes before the dying fire.
[Illustration: "He finished up the evening at the Chequers."]
He awoke with a bad cold and pains in the limbs. A headache was not
unexpected, but the other symptoms were. With trembling hands he managed
to light a fire and prepare a breakfast, which he left untouched. This
last symptom was the most alarming of all, and going to the door he
bribed a small boy with a penny to go for Dr. Murchison, and sat cowering
over the fire until he came.
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