"I do wish you would be quiet, Mr. Ben."
"Ah," said another voice, "keep him in order, Julia, for he has been quite raving about your beauty as we came along the street, I can tell you. Do you think the servant will be able to find your father?"
"Oh yes, Sir Richard. If ma were at home she could have said at once where he was; but Martha will find him, I dare say."
Todd threw the bed-clothes right over his head. It was no other than Sir Richard Blunt who was in the front-room of that diabolical lodging-house, and Todd looked upon himself as all but in custody. His sense of hearing seemed to be preternaturally acute, and although the bed-clothes covered up his ears, and he could not be said to be exactly in his usual state, inasmuch as terror had half deprived him of his reasoning powers, yet he heard plainly, and with what might be called a perfect distinctness, every word that was spoken in the front room.
Perhaps, even in the condemned cell of Newgate, Todd did not suffer such terrors as he was now assailed with in that lodging, where he thought he was so safe, and which he had, as he fancied, managed so cleverly.
"Will you be quiet, Ben!" said the girl's voice again.
"Make him—make him, Julia," said Sir Richard.
"Lor bless your little bits of eyes," said Ben. "Do now come and sit in my lap, and I'll tell you such a lively story of how the leopard we have got at the Tower lost a bit off the end of his tail?"
"I don't want to hear it."
"You don't want to hear it? Come—come, my lambkin of a Julia—when shall we be married? Oh, do name the day your Ben will be done for for life. I want it over."