He stopped and turned round.

“Hang me!  ’Tis the very one Bet wrote of, and I read you the letter.  Dost remember it?  The vixen who clouted the Chaplain for kissing her.”

“Yes,” said Roxholm; “I remember.”

Tom rattled on in monstrous spirits.  “I have had further letters from Bet,” he said, “and each is a sermon with the beauty’s sins for a text.  The women are so jealous of her that the men could not forget her if they would, they scold so everlastingly.  Lord, what a stir the hoyden is making!”

They turned into Rag Lane presently, and ’twas dingy enough, being a dirty, narrow place, with high black houses on either side, their windows broken and stuffed with bits of rag and paper, their doorways ornamented with slatternly women or sodden-faced men, while up and down ran squalid, noisy children under the flapping pieces of poor wearing apparel hung on lines to dry.

After some questioning they found the house the man they were in search of lived in, and ’twas a shade dingier than the rest.  They mounted a black broken-down stairway till they reached the garret, and there knocked at the door.

For a few moments there was no answer, but that they could hear loud and steady snores within.

“He is sleeping it off!” said Tom, grinning, and whacked loudly on the door’s cracked panels, by which, after two or three attacks, he evidently disturbed the sleeper, who was heard first to snort and then to begin to grumble forth drowsy profanities.

“Let us in,” cried Tom.  “I bring you a patron, sleepy fool.”

Then ’twas plain some one tumbled from his bed and shuffled forward to the door, whose handle he had some difficulty in turning.  But when he got the door open, and caught sight of lace and velvet, plumed hats and shining swords, he was not so drunk but that which the sight suggested enlivened and awaked him.  He uttered an exclamation, threw the door wide, and stood making unsteady but humbly propitiatory bows.

“Your lordships’ pardon,” he said.  “I was asleep and knew not that such honour awaited me.  Enter, your lordships; I pray you enter.”

’Twas a little mean place with no furnishings but a broken bedstead, a rickety chair, and an uncleanly old table on which were huddled together a dry loaf, an empty bottle, and some poor daubs of pictures.  The painter himself was an elderly man with a blotched face, a bibulous eye, and half unclothed, he having wrapped a dirty blanket about his body to conceal decently his lack of nether garments.

“We come to look at your portrait of the Gloucestershire beauty,” said Tom.

“All want to look at it, my Lord,” said the man, with a leer, half servile, half cunning.  “There came two young gentlemen of fashion yesterday morning, and almost lost their wits at sight of it.  Either would have bought it, but both had had ill luck at basset for a week and so could do no more than look, and go forth with their mouths watering.”