A maid servant opened the door, when, without a word, the two men went in.
The girl looked the door after them, bolted it top and bottom, and finally secured it with a chain, which made it resemble the door of a prison.
All this had been done in the space of a few seconds.
“Is the missis in, my dear?” said one of the men, in a tone half husky and half oleaginous.
“Yes, sir,” returned the girl. “I think she’s been expecting you; or, if it’s not you, it’s somebody else. You will find her in the little parlour.”
The men looked at one another, nodded in a mysterious self-satisfied manner, and entered the room.
The little parlour in which they found themselves was furnished in a grotesque and peculiar style. The chairs were all of a different shape, size, and pattern. The carpet would have suited a large dining-room in some palatial mansion, and the paper a summer boudoir; while the dark oak bureau, in one corner of the apartment, frowned with all the sternness of antiquity upon a new and fashionable maple-wood cabinet in the other. As to any furniture en suite, as the modern advertisements have it, that was altogether out of the question.
The pictures, however, which disfigured the walls were all of the same caste and quality, equally indifferent in morality and art.
They consisted of portraits of celebrated criminals, executions, highwaymen stopping carriages and coaches, smugglers attacked by the preventive men, and pirates committing atrocities on the high seas.
“I thought she said her mistress was here,” observed one of the men.