"Is Miss Lambert in?"
"Yus."
"Then give her my card, please. I would like to speak to her."
The person behind the door undid the chain, satisfied evidently by Bevan's voice and appearance that he was not a dun or a robber. The door opened disclosing a servant maid, very young and very dirty.
This ash-cat took the piece of pasteboard, and made a pretence of reading it, invited Charles to enter, and then closing the door, and barring it this time as if to keep him in, should he try to escape, led the way across a rather empty hall to a library.
Here she invited him to sit down upon a chair, having first dusted it with her apron, and declaring that she would send Miss Fanny to him in "a minit," vanished, and left him to his meditations.
"Most extraordinary place," said Charles, glancing round at the books in their cases. "Most extraordinary place I ever entered."
As he looked about him, he heard the youthful servant's voice raised now to its highest pitch, and calling "Miss Fanny, Miss Fanny, Miss F-a-a-anny" and dying away as if in back passages.
The library was evidently much inhabited by the Lamberts; it was pleasantly perfumed with tobacco, and in the grate lay the expiring embers of a morning fire. The Lamberts were evidently not of the order of people who extinguish their fires on the first of May. There were whips and fishing-rods, and a gun or two here and there, and books everywhere about, besides those on the shelves. The morning paper lay spread open on the floor, where it had been cast by the last reader, and on the floor lay other things, which in most houses are to be found on tables, envelopes crumpled up, letters, and other trifles.