Miss Pynsent, however, resisted her malady for nearly a fortnight more, during which Hyacinth was constantly in her room. He never went back to Mr. Crookenden's, with whose establishment, through violent causes, his relations seemed indefinitely suspended; and in fact, for the rest of the time that Pinnie demanded his care he absented himself but twice from Lomax Place for more than a few minutes. On one of these occasions he travelled over to Audley Court and spent an hour there; on the other he met Millicent Henning, by appointment, and took a walk with her on the Embankment. He tried to find a moment to go and thank Madame Poupin for a sympathetic offering, many times repeated, of tisane, concocted after a receipt thought supreme by the couple in Lisson Grove (though little appreciated in the neighbourhood generally); but he was obliged to acknowledge her kindness only by a respectful letter, which he composed with some trouble, though much elation, in the French tongue, peculiarly favourable, as he believed, to little courtesies of this kind. Lady Aurora came again and again to the darkened house, where she diffused her beneficent influence in nightly watches, in the most modern sanative suggestions, in conversations with Hyacinth, directed with more ingenuity than her fluttered embarrassments might have led one to attribute to her, to the purpose of diverting his mind, and in tea-makings (there was a great deal of this liquid consumed on the premises during Pinnie's illness), after a system more enlightened than the usual fashion of Pentonville. She was the bearer of several messages and of a good deal of medical advice from Rose Muniment, whose interest in the dressmaker's case irritated Hyacinth by its fine courage, which even at second-hand was still obtrusive;
