What she did with it, Heaven only knows. I know she did not buy
herself gloves!
Twirling the Colonel's letter about, I thought the position over.
"What, then," I asked, "do you wish us to do?"
Habited as I have attempted to describe, Miss Blake sat at one side of a
library-table. In, I flatter myself, a decent suit of clothes, washed,
brushed, shaved, I sat on the other. To ordinary observers, I know I
must have seemed much the best man of the two--yet Miss Blake got the
better of me.
She, that dilapidated, red-hot, crumpled-collared, fingerless-gloved
woman, looked me over from head to foot, as I conceived, though my boots
were hidden away under the table, and I declare--I swear--she put me out
of countenance. I felt small under the stare of a person with whom I
would not then have walked through Hyde Park in the afternoon for almost
any amount of money which could have been offered to me.
"Though you are only a clerk," she said at length, apparently quite
unconscious of the effect she had produced, "you seem a very decent sort
of young man. As Mr. Craven is out of the way, suppose you go and see
that Morris man, and ask him what he means by his impudent letter."
I rose to the bait. Being in Mr. Craven's employment, it is unnecessary
to say I, in common with every other person about the place, thought I
could manage his business for him very much better than he could manage
it for himself; and it had always been my own personal conviction that
if the letting of the Uninhabited House were entrusted to me, the place
would not stand long empty.
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