is proposed new inmate. But he would try. He would go on to Startup
after having seen Carry at the Three Honest Men, and use what
eloquence he could command for the occasion.

He drove himself over on the next day to meet an early train, and
was in Salisbury by nine o'clock. He had to ask his way to the Three
Honest Men, and at last had some difficulty in finding the house.
It was a small beershop, in a lane on the very outskirts of the
city, and certainly seemed to him, as he looked at it, to be as
disreputable a house, in regard to its outward appearance, as ever he
had proposed to enter. It was a brick building of two stories, with a
door in the middle of it which stood open, and a red curtain hanging
across the window on the left-hand side. Three men dressed like
navvies were leaning against the door-posts. There is no sign,
perhaps, which gives to a house of this class so disreputable an
appearance as red curtains hung across the window; and yet there is
no other colour for pot-house curtains that has any popularity. The
one fact probably explains the other. A drinking-room with a blue or
a brown curtain would offer no attraction to the thirsty navvy who
likes to have his thirst indulged without criticism. But, in spite of
the red curtain, Fenwick entered the house, and asked the uncomely
woman at the bar after Sam Brattle. Was there a man named Sam Brattle
staying there;--a man with a sister?

Then were let loose against the unfortunate clergyman the floodgates
of a drunken woman's angry tongue. It was not only that the landlady
of the Three Honest Men was very drunk, but also that she was very
angry. Sam Brattle and his sister had been there, but they had been
turned out of the house. There had manifestly been some great row,
and Carry Brattle was spoken of with all the worst terms of reproach
which one woman can heap upon the name of another. The mistress of
the Three Honest Men was a married woman,--and, as far as that went,
respectable; whereas poor Carry was not married, and certainly not
respectable. Something of her past history had been known. She had
been called names which she could not repudiate, and the truth of
which even her brother on her behalf could not deny; and then she had
been turned into the street. So much Mr. Fenwick learned from the
drunken woman, and nothing more he could learn. When he asked after
Carry's present address the woman jeered at him, and accused him of
base purposes in comi