"Her's crying her eyes out up yon, mester."
And Mrs. Tams also snivelled.
The superior being frowned and said testily, yet not without a touch of careless toleration—
"Oh, get away, you silly old fool of a woman!"
Mrs. Tarns got away, not entirely ill-content.
In the lobby she heard an unusual rapping on the glass of the front door, and sharply opened it to inform the late disturber that there existed a bell and a knocker for respectable people. A shabby youth gave her a note for "Louis Fores, Esq.," and said that there was an answer. So that she was forced to renew the enterprise of entering the throne-room.
In another couple of minutes Louis was running upstairs. His wife heard him, and shook in bed from excitement at the crisis which approached. But she could never have divined the nature of the phenomenon by which the unbridgable breach was about to be closed.
"Louise!"
"Yes," she whimpered. Then she ventured to spy at his face through an interstice of the bedclothes, and saw thereon a most queer, white expression.
"Some one's just brought this. Read it."