“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs crossed, “he can’t read yet, can he?”

“Read!  He’ll never read.  He can make all the letters separately, and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got on that much, under me; but he can’t put them together.  He’s too old to acquire the knack of it now—­and too drunk.”

“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, “how do you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?”

“He never spelt it out.  You know what a curious power of eye he has and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by eye alone.  He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a letter, and asked me what it meant.”

“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again, “should you say that the original was a man’s writing or a woman’s?”

“A woman’s.  Fifty to one a lady’s—­slopes a good deal, and the end of the letter ‘n,’ long and hasty.”

Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg.  As he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve.  It takes his attention.  He stares at it, aghast.

“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night?  Is there a chimney on fire?”

“Chimney on fire!”

“Ah!” returns Mr. Guppy.  “See how the soot’s falling.  See here, on my arm!  See again, on the table here!  Confound the stuff, it won’t blow off—­smears like black fat!”

They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs.  Comes back and says it’s all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol’s Arms.

“And it was then,” resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very near together, “that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger’s portmanteau?”

“That was the time, sir,” answers Tony, faintly adjusting his whiskers.  “Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots.”

The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he abandons that and his whiskers together, and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again.

“You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them.  That’s the arrangement, isn’t it, Tony?” asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting his thumb-nail.

“You can’t speak too low.  Yes.  That’s what he and I agreed.”