indeed a
half-crown--the first she had ever been given in her life.

She dropped a rude sort of curtsey, and, opening the door of a room,
half ushered, half pushed him in. Then she went to the foot of the
stairs, the coin tightly clinched in her hand, and he heard her call
out----

"Master! There's a gent here from furrin parts has wants you, which 'is
name his immaterial. 'E's in the parlor."

There was a growl in reply, and then silence. The handmaiden, her duty
discharged, shuffled off to the lower regions. The visitor was left
alone.

He looked around him in deep and increasing disgust. The walls of the
little room into which he had been shown were bare, save for a few cheap
chromos and glaring oleographs of the sort distributed by grocers and
petty tradespeople at Christmas. A cracked looking-glass, with a dirty
gilt frame, tottered upon the mantelpiece. The furniture was scanty, and
of the public-house pattern, and there was a strong nauseous odor of
stale tobacco smoke and beer. A small piano stood in one corner, the
cheapest of its kind, and maintaining an upright position only by means
of numerous props. One leg tilted in the air was supported by two old
and coverless volumes of a novel, and another was casterless. The carpet
was worn into shreds, and there was no attempt to conceal or mend the
huge ravages which time had made in it. The ceiling was cracked and
black with smoke, and the faded paper was hanging down from the top of
the wall. There was not a single article or spot in the room on which
the eye could rest with pleasure. It was an interior which matched the
exterior. Nothing worse could be said about it.

The visitor took it all in, and raising his hand to his head closed his
eyes. Ah! what a relief it was to blot it all out of sight, if only for
a moment. He had known evil times, but at their worst, such surroundings
as these he had never met with. A strange nervousness was creeping
slowly over him, the presage of disappointment. He dropped his hands,
and walked restlessly up and down, striving to banish his fears. Might
not all this be necessary--a form of disguise--a clever mode of
concealment? Poverty alone could not have brought things to this strait.
Poverty! There had been no poverty in his day. Yet he was full of
forebodings. He remembered the wonder, the evasions, almost the pity
with which his first inquiries in Rome had been met. He could not expect
to find things exactly the same.