At this minute, Mr. Gale entered from the front shop to show a customer some Delft plates; and he did not see—­but we did—­the figure rise up from the porcelain stool, shake its head, which it held in its hand, and which kept its eyes fixed sadly on us, and disappear behind the guillotine.

“Come to the ‘Gray’s-Inn Coffee-House,’” Pinto said, “and I will tell you how the notch came to the ax.”  And we walked down Holborn at about thirty-seven minutes past six o’clock.

If there is anything in the above statement which astonishes the reader, I promise him that in the next chapter of this little story he will be astonished still more.

II

“You will excuse me,” I said to my companion, “for remarking that when you addressed the individual sitting on the porcelain stool, with his head in his lap, your ordinarily benevolent features”—­ (this I confess was a bouncer, for between ourselves a more sinister and ill-looking rascal than Mons. P. I have seldom set eyes on)—­“your ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing.  You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei—­, pardon me, as I thought you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers”; and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the man—­I did not dare to offend the man.  I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin’s Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a policeman, but not one would come.  I was this man’s slave.  I followed him like his dog.  I could not get away from him.  So, you see, I went on meanly conversing with him, and affecting a simpering confidence.  I remember, when I was a little boy at school, going up fawning and smiling in this way to some great hulking bully of a sixth-form boy.  So I said in a word, “Your ordinarily handsome face wore a disagreeable expression,” &c.

“It is ordinarily very handsome,” said he, with such a leer at a couple of passers-by, that one of them cried, “Oh, crickey, here’s a precious guy!” and a child, in its nurse’s arms, screamed itself into convulsions.  “Oh, oui, che suis tres-choli garcon, bien peau, cerdainement,” continued Mr. Pinto; “but you were right.  That—­ that person was not very well pleased when he saw me.  There was no love lost between us, as you say:  and the world never knew a more worthless miscreant.  I hate him, voyez-vous?  I hated him alife; I hate him dead.  I hate him man; I hate him ghost:  and he know it, and tremble before me.  If I see him twenty tausend years hence—­ and why not?—­I shall hate him still.  You remarked how he was dressed?”

“In black satin breeches and striped stockings; a white pique waistcoat, a gray coat, with large metal buttons, and his hair in powder.  He must have worn a pigtail—­only—­”