Nethercoats early. Good night, papa."

Mr Vavasor, as he went up to his bedroom, felt sure that there had
been something wrong between his daughter and her lover. "I don't
know how she'll ever put up with him," he said to himself, "he is so
terribly conceited. I shall never forget how he went on about Charles
Kemble, and what a fool he made of himself."

Alice, before she went to bed, sat down and wrote a letter to her
cousin Kate.

CHAPTER XII

Mr George Vavasor at Home

It cannot perhaps fairly be said that George Vavasor was an
unhospitable man, seeing that it was his custom to entertain his
friends occasionally at Greenwich, Richmond, or such places; and
he would now and again have a friend to dine with him at his club.
But he never gave breakfasts, dinners, or suppers under his own
roof. During a short period of his wine-selling career, at which
time he had occupied handsome rooms over his place of business in
New Burlington Street, he had presided at certain feasts given to
customers or expectant customers by the firm; but he had not found
this employment to his taste, and had soon relinquished it to one
of the other partners. Since that he had lived in lodgings in Cecil
Street,--down at the bottom of that retired nook, near to the river
and away from the Strand. Here he had simply two rooms on the first
floor, and hither his friends came to him very rarely. They came very
rarely on any account. A stray man might now and then pass an hour
with him here; but on such occasions the chances were that the visit
had some reference, near or distant, to affairs of business. Eating
or drinking there was never any to be found here by the most intimate
of his allies. His lodgings were his private retreat, and they were
so private that but few of his friends knew where he lived.

And had it been possible he would have wished that no one should have
known his whereabouts. I am not aware that he had any special reason
for this peculiarity, or that there was anything about his mode of
life that required hiding; but he was a man who had always lived as
though secrecy in certain matters might at any time become useful
to him. He had a mode of dressing himself when he went out at night
that made it almost impossible that any one should recognise him. The
people at his lodgings did not even know that he had relatives, and
his nearest relatives hardly knew that he had lodgings. Even Kate
had never been at the rooms i