‘Mrs. Elderfield—­’

He paused, and looked gravely at the widow.  She had a plain, honest, healthy face, with resolute lips, and an eye that brightened when she spoke; her well-knit figure, motionless in its respectful attitude, declared a thoroughly sound condition of the nerves.

’Mrs. Elderfield, your bill is so very moderate that I think you must have forgotten something.’

‘Have you looked it over, sir?’

‘I never trouble with the details.  Please examine it.’

‘There is no need, sir.  I never make a mistake.’

‘I said, Mrs. Elderfield, please examine it.’

She seemed to hesitate, but obeyed.

‘The bill is quite correct, sir.’

‘Thank you.’

He paid it at once and said no more.

The weeks went on.  To Mr. Jordan’s surprise, his landlady’s zeal and efficiency showed no diminution, a thing unprecedented in his long and varied experience.  After the first day or two he had found nothing to correct; every smallest instruction was faithfully carried out.  Moreover, he knew for the first time in his life the comfort of absolutely clean rooms.  The best of his landladies hitherto had not risen above that conception of cleanliness which is relative to London soot and fog.  His palate, too, was receiving an education.  Probably he had never eaten of a joint rightly cooked, or tasted a potato boiled as it should be; more often than not, the food set before him had undergone a process which left it masticable indeed, but void of savour and nourishment.  Many little attentions of which he had never dreamed kept him in a wondering cheerfulness.  And at length he said to himself:  ’Here I shall stay.’

Not that his constant removals had been solely due to discomfort and a hope of better things.  The secret—­perhaps not entirely revealed even to himself—­lay in Mr. Jordan’s sense of his own importance, and his uneasiness whenever he felt that, in the eyes of a landlady, he was becoming a mere everyday person—­an ordinary lodger.  No sooner did he detect a sign of this than he made up his mind to move.  It gave him the keenest pleasure of which he was capable when, on abruptly announcing his immediate departure, he perceived the landlady’s profound mortification.  To make the blow heavier he had even resorted to artifice, seeming to express a most lively contentment during the very days when he had decided to leave and was asking himself where he should next abide.  One of his delights was to return to a house which he had quitted years ago, to behold the excitement and bustle occasioned by his appearance, and play the good-natured autocrat over grovelling dependents.  In every case, save the two already mentioned, he had parted with his landlady on terms of friendliness, never vouchsafing a reason for his going away, genially eluding every attempt to obtain an explanation, and at the last abounding in graceful recognition of all that had