I had had sufficient evidence of the truth of this altogether apart from the landlady’s frank admission.

’Why, for all he could have done to help himself I might have kept the money, and only sent him a receipt for a quarter.  And some folks would have done,—­but I’m not one of that sort myself, and shouldn’t care to be.  So I sent this here party,—­I never could pronounce his name, and never shall—­a receipt for a year.’

Miss Coleman paused to smooth her apron, and consider.

’Well, the receipt should have reached this here party on the Thursday morning, as it were,—­I posted it on the Wednesday night, and on the Thursday, after breakfast, I thought I’d go over the way to see if there was any little thing I could do,—­because there wasn’t hardly a whole pane of glass in the place,—­when I all but went all of a heap.  When I looked across the road, blessed it the party wasn’t in already,—­at least as much as he ever was in, which, so far as I can make out, never has been anything particular,—­though how he had got in, unless it was through a window in the middle of the night, is more than I should care to say,—­there was nobody in the house when I went to bed, that I could pretty nearly take my Bible oath,—­yet there was the blind up at the parlour, and, what’s more, it was down, and it’s been down pretty nearly ever since.

’"Well,” I says to myself, “for right down imperence this beats anything,—­why he’s in the place before he knows if I’ll let him have it.  Perhaps he thinks I haven’t got a word to say in the matter,—­fifty pounds or no fifty pounds, I’ll soon show him.”  So I slips on my bonnet, and I walks over the road, and I hammers at the door.

’Well, I have seen people hammering since then, many a one, and how they’ve kept it up has puzzled me,—­for an hour, some of them,—­but I was the first one as begun it.  I hammers, and I hammers, and I kept on hammering, but it wasn’t no more use than if I’d been hammering at a tombstone.  So I starts rapping at the window, but that wasn’t no use neither.  So I goes round behind, and I hammers at the back door,—­but there, I couldn’t make anyone hear nohow.  So I says to myself, “Perhaps the party as is in, ain’t in, in a manner of speaking; but I’ll keep an eye on the house, and when he is in I’ll take care that he ain’t out again before I’ve had a word to say.”

’So I come back home, and as I said I would, I kept an eye on the house the whole of that livelong day, but never a soul went either out or in.  But the next day, which it was a Friday, I got out of bed about five o’clock, to see if it was raining, through my having an idea of taking a little excursion if the weather was fine, when I see a party coming down the road.  He had on one of them dirty-coloured bed-cover sort of things, and it was wrapped all over his head and round his body, like, as I have been told, them there Arabs wear,—­and, indeed, I’ve seen them in them myself at West Brompton, when they was in the exhibition there.  It was quite fine, and broad day, and I see him as plainly as I see you, —­he comes skimming along at a tear of a pace, pulls up at the house over the way, opens the front door, and lets himself in.