But all the time, as he hurried along to the next corner, he looked fearfully to the right and left. Presently he began to steal guilty glances at the numbers of the houses. He said to himself that he would see what kind of a looking house they did live in, any way. It was only No. 900 odd when he began, and he could turn off if he wished long before he reached 1334. As he drew nearer he said he would just give a look at it, and then rush by. But 1334 was a house so much larger and nicer than he had expected that he stopped to collect his slow rustic thoughts, and decide whether she really lived there or whether she had just given that number for a blind. He did not know why he should think that, though; she was dressed well enough to come out of any house.
While he lingered before the house an old man with a cane in his hand and his mouth hanging open stopped and peered through his spectacles, whose glare he fixed upon Lemuel, till he began to feel himself a suspicious character. The old man did not say anything, but stood faltering upon his stick and now and then gathering up his lower lip as if he were going to speak, but not speaking. Lemuel cleared his throat. “Hmmn! Is this a boarding-house?”
“I don't know,” crowed the old man, in a high senile note. “You want table board or rooms?”
“I don't want board at all,” began Lemuel again.
“What?” crowed the old man; and he put up his hand to his ear.
People were beginning to put their heads out of the neighbouring windows, and to walk slowly as they went by, so as to hear what he and the old man were saying. He could not run away now, and he went boldly up to the door of the large house and rang.
A girl came, and he asked her, with a flushed face, if Miss Amanda Grier boarded there; somehow he could not bear to ask for Miss Dudley.
“Well,” the girl said, “she rooms here,” as if that might be a different thing to Lemuel altogether.
“Oh!” he said. “Is she in?”
“Well, you can walk in,” said the girl, “and I'll see.” She came back to ask, “Who shall I say called?”