“Well, sir, we can ask. Perhaps the carpenter is only lodging here?”
A tidy young woman, with a baby in her arms, answered the knock. “Does Mrs. Mapping live here still?” asked the Squire.
“No, sir,” she answered. “I don’t know the name.”
“Not know the name!” retorted he, turning crusty; for he disliked, of all things, to be puzzled or thwarted. “Mrs. Mapping lived here for ten or a dozen years, anyhow.”
“Oh, stay, sir,” she said, “I remember the name now. Mapping; yes, that was it. She lived here before we came in.”
“Is she dead?”
“No, sir. She was sold up.”
“Sold up?”
“Yes, sir. Her lodging-letting fell off—this neighbourhood’s not what it was: people like to get further up, Islington way—and she was badly off for a long while, could not pay her rent, or anything; so at last the landlord was obliged to sell her up. At least, that’s what we heard after we came here, but the house lay empty for some months between. I did not hear what became of her.”
The people at the next house could not tell anything; they were fresh-comers also; and the Squire stood in a quandary. I thought of Pitt the surgeon; he was sure to know; and ran off to his surgery in the next street.