In a few minutes I heard the voice of my landlady.  I caught a glance of her as she came tramping up-stairs; her face glowing, her cap flaring, her tongue wagging the whole way.  “She’d have no such doings in her house, she’d warrant!  If gentlemen did spend money freely, it was no rule.  She’d have no servant maids of hers treated in that way, when they were about their work, that’s what she wouldn’t!”

As I hate squabbles, particularly with women, and above all with pretty women, I slunk back into my room, and partly closed the door; but my curiosity was too much excited not to listen.  The landlady marched intrepidly to the enemy’s citadel, and entered it with a storm:  the door closed after her.  I heard her voice in high windy clamour for a moment or two.  Then it gradually subsided, like a gust of wind in a garret; then there was a laugh; then I heard nothing more.

After a little while, my landlady came out with an odd smile on her face, adjusting her cap, which was a little on one side.  As she wont down-stairs, I heard the landlord ask her what was the matter; she said, “Nothing at all, only the girl’s a fool.”  I was more than ever perplexed what to make of this unaccountable personage, who could put a good-natured chamber-maid in a passion, and send away a termagant landlady in smiles.  He could not be so old, nor cross, nor ugly either.

I had to go to work at his picture again, and to paint him entirely different.  I now set him down for one of those stout gentlemen that are frequently met with, swaggering about the doors of country inns.  Moist, merry fellows, in Belcher handkerchiefs, whose bulk is a little assisted by malt liquors.  Men who have seen the world, and been sworn at Highgate; who are used to tavern life; up to all the tricks of tapsters, and knowing in the ways of sinful publicans.  Free-livers on a small scale; who are prodigal within the compass of a guinea; who call all the waiters by name, touzle the maids, gossip with the landlady at the bar, and prose over a pint of port, or a glass of negus, after dinner.

The morning wore away in forming of these and similar surmises.  As fast as I wove one system of belief, some movement of the unknown would completely overturn it, and throw all my thoughts again into confusion.  Such are the solitary operations of a feverish mind.  I was, as I have said, extremely nervous; and the continual meditation on the concerns of this invisible personage began to have its effect:—­I was getting a fit of the fidgets.

Dinner-time came.  I hoped, the stout gentleman might dine in the travellers’-room, and that I might at length get a view of his person; but no—­he had dinner served in his own room.  What could be the meaning of this solitude and mystery?  He could not be a radical; there was something too aristocratical in thus keeping himself apart from the rest of the world, and condemning himself to his own dull company throughout a rainy day.  And