said Tom. "I would get there before any other fellow does.
Jack Wyse and Hal Langton both want it, but they have gamed their
pockets empty, and wait till necessity forces him to lower his price to
their means. But an hour since I heard that he had pawned his breeches
and lay in bed writing begging letters. So now is the time to visit
him. It was in Gloucestershire he found her--"

He stopped and turned round.

"Hang me! 'Tis the very one Bet wrote of, and I read you the letter.
Dost remember it? The vixen who clouted the Chaplain for kissing her."

"Yes," said Roxholm; "I remember."

Tom rattled on in monstrous spirits. "I have had further letters from
Bet," he said, "and each is a sermon with the beauty's sins for a text.
The women are so jealous of her that the men could not forget her if
they would, they scold so everlastingly. Lord, what a stir the hoyden
is making!"

They turned into Rag Lane presently, and 'twas dingy enough, being a
dirty, narrow place, with high black houses on either side, their
windows broken and stuffed with bits of rag and paper, their doorways
ornamented with slatternly women or sodden-faced men, while up and down
ran squalid, noisy children under the flapping pieces of poor wearing
apparel hung on lines to dry.

After some questioning they found the house the man they were in search
of lived in, and 'twas a shade dingier than the rest. They mounted a
black broken-down stairway till they reached the garret, and there
knocked at the door.

For a few moments there was no answer, but that they could hear loud
and steady snores within.

"He is sleeping it off!" said Tom, grinning, and whacked loudly on the
door's cracked panels, by which, after two or three attacks, he
evidently disturbed the sleeper, who was heard first to snort and then
to begin to grumble forth drowsy profanities.

"Let us in," cried Tom. "I bring you a patron, sleepy fool."

Then 'twas plain some one tumbled from his bed and shuffled forward to
the door, whose handle he had some difficulty in turning. But when he
got the door open, and caught sight of lace and velvet, plumed hats and
shining swords, he was not so drunk but that which the sight suggested
enlivened and awaked him. He uttered an exclamation, threw the door
wide, and stood making unsteady but humbly propitiatory bows.

"Your lordships' pardon," he said. "I was asleep and knew not that such
honour awaited me. Enter, your lordships; I pray you enter