"Then," continued the old man, "you cannot tell who occupied the flat below at that long period back?"
"No."
"And who occupies it now?"
Geordie was as dumb as the white figure, or as the head on the pillow with the rat-brown mutch; and this time Christian answered for him:
"It hasna been occupied for twenty years, sir; and it has been shut up a' that lang time."
"Twenty years!" ejaculated the old man, pondering deeply, and sighing heavily and painfully.
"Do any of you know Mr. Thomas Dallas, the Clerk to the Signet, who lived once in Lady Stair's Close?"
"Dead eighteen years since," replied the wife.
"Ah, I see," rejoined the stranger; "and so the house has been thus long closed!" Then musingly, "But then it will be empty—no furniture, nothing but bare walls."
"Naebody kens," replied George, still busy examining the face of the questioner, as if he could not get it to be steady alongside the image in his own mind.