A Change in the Cabinet by Hilaire Belloc — Read

All night Sir Charles Repton had tossed in an uneasy slumber; all night / his faithful wife Maria had sat up watching him. She dared not trust a / trained nurse; she dared not trust a single member of the household, / for he muttered as he slept strange things concerning the governance of / England, and stranger things concerning his own financial schemes.

At one moment, it was about half-past four in the morning, -- much at the / time when Demaine, seventy miles away, upon the bosom of the ocean, had / woken to see the sun -- his predecessor in the Wardenship of the Court / of Dowry (and still the titular holder of that office) had started / suddenly up in bed, and violently denounced a man with an Austrian name / as having cheated him by obtaining prior information upon the Budget. / He asked rapidly in his mania why Consols had gone up in the first week / of April, and would not be pacified until his wife, with the tact that / is born of affection, had assumed the rôle of the unpleasing foreigner / and had confessed all. Then and then only was he pacified and fell into / the first true sleep he had enjoyed for twenty-four hours. He slept / until eleven, and she, brave woman that she was, snatched some little / sleep at his side, but only upon the edge of sleep as it were, waking / at any moment to shield him from the consequences of his disease.