had been deaf, his hands
thrust down into the loose pockets of his overcoat and his deep-sunken
eyes fixed wistfully but not impatiently upon the closed door. He was a
mute picture of resignation.

At last, after his third summons, the door was slowly and cautiously
opened, and the astonished visitor beheld, for the first time in his
life, a London maid-of-all-work. The astonishment seemed perfectly
mutual. He, with his parchment dried face, white hair and eyebrows, and
piercing black eyes only a little dimmed by time, muffled up to the
throat in furs, and unmistakably a foreigner, was as strange to her as
her appearance was to him. He looked at her black hands, her face
besmeared with dirt, and with her uncombed hair hanging loose around it,
at the tattered and soiled print gown looped up on one side and held
together on the other by pins, and at the white-stockinged feet showing
through the holes in her boots. What an object it was! It was fortunate
for him that the twilight and fog concealed, partially at any rate, the
disgust in his face.

"Is--Mr. Bartlezzi in?" he inquired, as soon as he could find words to
speak at all.

"Lawk-a-mussy! I dunno," the girl answered in blank bewilderment. "He
don't have no visitors, he don't. You ain't taxes, are you?"

"No!" he answered, somewhat at a venture, for he did not catch her
meaning.

"Nor water rate? No, you ain't the water rate," she continued,
meditatively. "I knows him. He wears a brown billycock and glasses, 'e
does, and I see him walking with Mary Ann Stubbins on a Sunday."

He admitted doubtfully that she was correct He was not the water rate.

It began to dawn upon her that it would be safe to admit him into the
house.

"Just yer come hinside, will yer," she said. "I dunno who yer are, but I
guess you ain't nothink to be afraid of. Come hinside."

She opened the door and admitted him into a dark, narrow passage. He had
to squeeze himself against the wall to allow her to pass him. Then she
surveyed him critically again, with her arms akimbo and her head a
little on one side.

"I reckon you've got a name," she surmised. "What is it?"

"You can tell Mr. Bartlezzi that a gentleman from abroad desires to
speak with him," he answered. "My name is immaterial. Will you accept
this?" he added, holding out a half-crown timidly toward her.

She grabbed it from him, and turned it over incredulously in the
semi-darkness. There was no deception about it; it was