“Charles, it has come to that!  Robber!  It will be murder some day.”

“This day—­by——­”

Mr. Charles looked the man to make his word good.

Mrs. Rowe was amazed and terrified by the fiend she had conjured up in the man.  He seized the table, and looked a giant in the mighty expression of his iron will.

“Lay that roll upon the table—­or I’ll shiver it into a thousand pieces—­and then—­and then——­Am I to say more?”

Mrs. Rowe fell into a chair.  Mr. Charles was at her in an instant, and had possession of the notes.  The poor woman had swooned.

He rang the bell—­Jane appeared.

“Look after her,” said Mr. Charles, his eyes flaming, as they fell on the unconscious figure of Mrs. Rowe.  “But let me out, first.”

“You’ll kill me with fright, that you will.  What have you done to your own——­”

“Mind your own business.  A smell of salts’ll put her right enough.”

Mr. Charles was gone.

“And what a sweet gentleman he can be, when he likes,” said Jane.

CHAPTER III.

MRS. ROWE’S COMPANY.

I must be permitted to tell the rambling stories that ran parallel during my experiences of Mrs. Rowe’s establishment in my own manner—­filling up with what I guessed, all I heard from Lucy, or saw for myself.  Mr. Charles was a visitor at intervals who always arrived when the house was quiet; and after whose visits Mrs. Rowe regularly took to her room for the day, leaving the accounts and the keys wholly to Lucy, and the kitchen to Jane—­with strict injunctions to look after the Reverend Horace Mohun’s tea and his round of toast if he called—­and let him see the Times before it went up to the general sitting-room.  On these days Lucy looked pale; and Jane called her “poor child” to me, and begged me to say a few words of comfort to her, for she would listen to me.

What a fool Jane was!

Visitors came and went.  The serious, who inspected Paris as Mr. Redgrave inspects a factory, or as the late Mr. Braidwood inspected a fire on the morrow; who did the Louvre and called for bread-and-butter and tea on the Boulevards at five.  The new-rich, who would not have breakfasted with the general company to save their vulgar little souls, threw their money to the fleecing shopkeepers (who knew their monde), and misbehaved themselves in all the most expensive ways possible.  The jolly ignorant, who were loud and unabashed in the sincerity and heartiness of their enjoyment, and had more litres of brandy in their bedrooms than the rest of the house, as Jane had it, “put together.”  The frugal, who counted the lumps of sugar, found fault with the dinners, lived with the fixed and savage determination to eat well up to the rate at which they were paying for their board, and stole in, in the evening, with their brandy hidden about them.  Somehow, although there never was a house in which more differences of opinion were held on nearly every question of human interest, there was a surprising harmony of ideas as to French brandy.  A Boulogne excursion boat on its homeward journey hardly contains more uncorked bottles of cognac, than were thrust in all kinds of secret places in the bedrooms under Mrs. Rowe’s roof.