"What are you sitting up for?"
"To see to the gas-burners in the drawing-room."
"Turn the gas off at the meter, and leave him in the dark next time," said Mr. Wesden. "You can go to bed now. I'll sit up for a little while; I'm going to sleep here to-night."
"Indeed, sir! Oh! sir, I hope that nothing serious has happened?"
"Nothing at all. It's not so very wonderful that I should come to my own house, I suppose, Mattie?"
"N—no," she answered, hesitating; "but it's past one o'clock."
"I couldn't sleep—and Harriet was at home with the good lady," he said, as if by way of excuse; adding very sulkily, a moment afterwards, "I never could sleep in that Camberwell place—I wish I'd never left the shop!"
Mr. Wesden hazarded no further reason for his eccentric arrival, and Mattie went up-stairs to lay it with the rest of her stock of mysteries daily accumulating round her. Mr. Wesden remained down-stairs, fidgeting with shop drawers, counting the money left in the till, and wandering up and down in a reckless, hypochondriacal fashion, very remarkable in a man of his phlegmatic temperament, and which it was as well for Mattie not to have seen.
Finally he groped his way down-stairs into the kitchen, and the coal-cellar where the gas-meter was placed, and with a wrench cut off the supply of gas for that night, casting Sidney Hinchford so suddenly into darkness, that he leaped up with an exclamation far from appropriate to his character.
"What the devil next?"