‘Who’s there?’

A whining beggar’s voice asked admission.

’But you can’t come in, for the house is shut up for the night, replied the cook.

‘’Tis a quare hour you lock your doors at,’ said the besieger.

‘Mighty quare, but so it is,’ she answered.

’But ‘tis a message for the misthress I have,’ answered the applicant.

‘Who from?’ demanded the porteress.

‘’Tis a present o’ some wine, acushla.’

‘Who from?’ repeated she, growing more uneasy.

‘Auch! woman, are you going to take it in, or no?’

‘Come in the morning, my good man,’ said she, ’for sorrow a foot you’ll put inside the house to-night.’

‘An’ that’s what I’m to tell them that sent me.’

‘Neither more nor less,’ replied she.

And so she heard a heavy foot clank along the pavement, and she tried to catch a glimpse of the returning figure, but she could not, though she laid her cheek against the window-pane.  However, she heard him whistling as he went, which gave her a better opinion of him, and she thought she heard the road gate shut after him.

So feeling relieved, and with a great sigh, she counted her money over; and answering Betty’s shrill summons to the study, as the woman was in haste, with a ‘Coming, coming this minute,’ she replaced her treasure, and got swiftly into poor Charles Nutter’s little chamber.  There was his pipe over the chimney, and his green, and gold-laced Sunday waistcoat folded on the little walnut table by the fire, and his small folio, ‘Maison Rustique, the Country Farme,’ with his old green worsted purse set for a marker in it where he had left off reading the night before all their troubles began; and his silk dressing-gown was hanging by the window-frame, and his velvet morning-cap on the same peg—­the dust had settled on them now.  And after her fright in the kitchen, all these mementoes smote her with a grim sort of reproach and menace, and she wished the window barred, and the door of the ominous little chamber locked for the night.

‘’Tis growing late,’ said the dealer from without, ’and I daren’t be on the road after dark.  Gi’ me my money, good girl; and here, take your stay-hook.’

And so saying, she looked a little puzzled up and down, as not well knowing how they were to make their exchange.

‘Here,’ says Moggy, ‘give it in here.’  And removing the fastening, she shoved the window up a little bit.  ‘Hould it, Betty; hould it up,’ said she.  And in came the woman’s hard, brown hand, palm open, for her money, and the other containing the jewel, after which the vain soul of Moggy lusted.

‘That’ll do,’ said she; and crying shrilly, ’Give us a lift, sweetheart,’ in a twinkling she shoved the window up, at the same time kneeling, with a spring, upon the sill, and getting her long leg into the room, with her shoulder under the window-sash, her foot firmly planted on the floor, and her face and head in the apartment.  Almost at the same instant she was followed by an ill-looking fellow, buttoned up in a surtout, whose stature seemed enormous, and at sight of whom the two women shrieked as if soul and body were parting.