"You remember your lodger, Mr. Aram?"
"A—well—yes!"
"An excellent man—"
"Humph."
"A most admirable man!"
"A-humph! he!—humph! that's neither here nor there."
"Why, you don't seem to think as all the rest of the world does with regard to him?"
"I knows what I knows."
"Ah! by the by, you have some cock-and-a-bull story about him, I fancy, but you never could explain yourself,—it is merely for the love of seeming wise that you invented it, eh, Goody?"
The old woman shook her head, and crossing her hands on her knee, replied with peculiar emphasis, but in a very low and whispered voice, "I could hang him!"