“And yet I am here now,” Mr. Guppy admits.  “My object being to communicate to your ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I am here.”

He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly.  “Nor can I,” Mr. Guppy returns with a sense of injury upon him, “too particularly request your ladyship to take particular notice that it’s no personal affair of mine that brings me here.  I have no interested views of my own to serve in coming here.  If it was not for my promise to Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred—­I, in point of fact, shouldn’t have darkened these doors again, but should have seen ’em further first.”

Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his hair with both hands.

“Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time I was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and whose loss we all deplore.  That party certainly did from that time apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely difficult for me to be sure that I hadn’t inadvertently led up to something contrary to Miss Summerson’s wishes.  Self-praise is no recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man of business neither.”

Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry.  Mr. Guppy immediately withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else.

“Indeed, it has been made so hard,” he goes on, “to have any idea what that party was up to in combination with others that until the loss which we all deplore I was gravelled—­an expression which your ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to consider tantamount to knocked over.  Small likewise—­a name by which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your ladyship is not acquainted with—­got to be so close and double-faced that at times it wasn’t easy to keep one’s hands off his ’ead.  However, what with the exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic turn and has your ladyship’s portrait always hanging up in his room), I have now reasons for an apprehension as to which I come to put your ladyship upon your guard.  First, will your ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any strange visitors this morning?  I don’t mean fashionable visitors, but such visitors, for instance, as Miss Barbary’s old servant, or as a person without the use of his lower extremities, carried upstairs similarly to a guy?”

“No!”

“Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and have been received here.  Because I saw them at the door, and waited at the corner of the square till they came out, and took half an hour’s turn afterwards to avoid them.”

“What have I to do with that, or what have you?  I do not understand you.  What do you mean?”