By the time we had done with these matters, which I wished to perdition, some score of applicants was in waiting for me.  And out of them I hired one who had been valet to the young Lord Rereby, and whose recommendation was excellent.  His name was Banks, his face open and ingenuous, his stature a little above the ordinary, and his manner respectful.  I had Davenport measure him at once for a suit of the Carvel livery, and bade him report on the morrow.

All this while, my dears, I was aching to be off to Arlington Street, but a foolish pride held me back.  I had heard so much of the fashion in which the Manners moved that I feared to bring ridicule upon them in poor MacMuir’s clothes.  But presently the desire to see Dolly took such hold upon me that I set out before dinner, fought my way past the chairmen and chaisemen at the door, and asked my way of the first civil person I encountered.  ’Twas only a little rise up the steps of St. James’s Street, Arlington Street being but a small pocket of Piccadilly, but it seemed a dull English mile; and my heart thumped when I reached the corner, and the houses danced before my eyes.  I steadied myself by a post and looked again.  At last, after a thousand leagues of wandering, I was near her!  But how to choose between fifty severe and imposing mansions?  I walked on toward that endless race of affairs and fashion, Piccadilly, scanning every door, nay, every window, in the hope that I might behold my lady’s face framed therein.  Here a chair was set down, there a chariot or a coach pulled up, and a clocked flunky bowing a lady in.  But no Dorothy.  Finally, when I had near made the round of each side, I summoned courage and asked a butcher’s lad, whistling as he passed me, whether he could point out the residence of Mr. Manners.

“Ay,” he replied, looking me over out of the corner of his eye, “that I can.  But y’ell not get a glimpse o’ the beauty this day, for she’s but just off to Kensington with a coachful o’ quality.”

And he led me, all in a tremble over his answer, to a large stone dwelling with arched windows, and pillared portico with lanthorns and link extinguishers, an area and railing beside it.  The flavour of generations of aristocracy hung about the place, and the big knocker on the carved door seemed to regard with such a forbidding frown my shabby clothes that I took but the one glance (enough to fix it forever in my memory), and hurried on.  Alas, what hope had I of Dorothy now!

“What cheer, Richard?” cried the captain when I returned; “have you seen your friends?”

I told him that I had feared to disgrace them, and so refrained from knocking—­a decision which he commended as the very essence of wisdom.  Though a desire to meet and talk with quality pushed him hard, he would not go a step to the ordinary, and gave orders to be served in our room, thus fostering the mystery which had enveloped us since our arrival.  Dinner at the Star and Garter being at the fashionable hour of half after four, I was forced to give over for that day the task of finding Mr. Dix.