“Come away from there, children?” muttered the mother. “He may hear you, and your papa will be very angry. Come away, I tell you?”
The girls slunk back from the door, and took seats upon a sofa.
But their mother’s curiosity had also to be appeased; and, with an example that corresponded ill with her precept, she dropped down upon her knees, and first placing her eye, and afterward her ear, to the keyhole, listened to every word spoken between her husband and his strange visitor with the “whiskers called moostachoes.”
Chapter Fifty Five.
A Tenant Secured.
The visitor thus introduced to the South Bank villa was a man of about thirty years of age, with the air and demeanour of a gentleman.
The city clerk could tell him to be of the West End type. It was visible in the cut of his dress, the tonsure of his hair, and the joining of the moustache to his whiskers.
“Mr McTavish, I presume?” were the words that came from him, as he passed through the parlour door.