“About the meals, sir?” said Mrs. Goldstraw.  “Have I a large, or a small, number to provide for?”

“If I can carry out a certain old-fashioned plan of mine,” replied Mr. Wilding, “you will have a large number to provide for.  I am a lonely single man, Mrs. Goldstraw; and I hope to live with all the persons in my employment as if they were members of my family.  Until that time comes, you will only have me, and the new partner whom I expect immediately, to provide for.  What my partner’s habits may be, I cannot yet say.  But I may describe myself as a man of regular hours, with an invariable appetite that you may depend upon to an ounce.”

“About breakfast, sir?” asked Mrs. Goldstraw.  “Is there anything particular—?”

She hesitated, and left the sentence unfinished.  Her eyes turned slowly away from her master, and looked towards the chimney-piece.  If she had been a less excellent and experienced housekeeper, Mr. Wilding might have fancied that her attention was beginning to wander at the very outset of the interview.

“Eight o’clock is my breakfast-hour,” he resumed.  “It is one of my virtues to be never tired of broiled bacon, and it is one of my vices to be habitually suspicious of the freshness of eggs.”  Mrs. Goldstraw looked back at him, still a little divided between her master’s chimney-piece and her master.  “I take tea,” Mr. Wilding went on; “and I am perhaps rather nervous and fidgety about drinking it, within a certain time after it is made.  If my tea stands too long—­”

He hesitated, on his side, and left the sentence unfinished.  If he had not been engaged in discussing a subject of such paramount interest to himself as his breakfast, Mrs. Goldstraw might have fancied that his attention was beginning to wander at the very outset of the interview.

“If your tea stands too long, sir—?” said the housekeeper, politely taking up her master’s lost thread.

“If my tea stands too long,” repeated the wine-merchant mechanically, his mind getting farther and farther away from his breakfast, and his eyes fixing themselves more and more inquiringly on his housekeeper’s face.  “If my tea—­Dear, dear me, Mrs. Goldstraw! what is the manner and tone of voice that you remind me of?  It strikes me even more strongly to-day, than it did when I saw you yesterday.  What can it be?”

“What can it be?” repeated Mrs. Goldstraw.

She said the words, evidently thinking while she spoke them of something else.  The wine-merchant, still looking at her inquiringly, observed that her eyes wandered towards the chimney-piece once more.  They fixed on the portrait of his mother, which hung there, and looked at it with that slight contraction of the brow which accompanies a scarcely conscious effort of memory.  Mr. Wilding remarked.

“My late dear mother, when she was five-and-twenty.”

Mrs. Goldstraw thanked him with a movement of the head for being at the pains to explain the picture, and said, with a cleared brow, that it was the portrait of a very beautiful lady.