“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me back my glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate.  Besides them three gentlemen that I have named, I don’t call to mind another since about eleven o’clock, when a stranger asked for you.”

“My uncle,” I muttered.  “Yes.”

“You saw him, sir?”

“Yes.  Oh yes.”

“Likewise the person with him?”

“Person with him!” I repeated.

“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman.  “The person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this way when he took this way.”

“What sort of person?”

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-coloured kind of clothes on, under a dark coat.  The watchman made more light of the matter than I did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two circumstances taken together.  Whereas they were easy of innocent solution apart — as, for instance, some diner-out or diner-at-home, who had not gone near this watchman’s gate, might have strayed to my staircase and dropped asleep there — and my nameless visitor might have brought some one with him to show him the way — still, joined, they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the morning, and fell into a doze before it.  I seemed to have been dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six.  As there was full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight woke me with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor could I do so yet.  I had not the power to attend to it.  I was greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.  As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an elephant.  When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.

At last, the old woman and the niece came in — the latter with a head not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom — and testified surprise at sight of me and the fire.  To whom I imparted how my uncle had come in the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations were to be modified accordingly.  Then, I washed and dressed while they knocked the furniture about and made a dust; and so, in a sort of dream or sleep-waking, I found myself sitting by the fire again, waiting for — Him — to come to breakfast.