What Will He Do With It? (Belford)/Book 3/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
The Investment revealed.
Gentleman Waife passed through a turnstile, down a narrow lane, and reached a solitary cottage. He knocked at the door; an old peasant woman opened it, and dropped him a civil courtesy. "Indeed, Sir, I am glad you are come. I'se most afeard he be dead."
"Dead!" exclaimed Waife. "Oh, Sophy, if he should be dead!"
"Who?"
Waife did not heed the question. "What makes you think him dead?" said he, fumbling in his pockets, from which he at last produced a key. "You have not been disobeying my strict orders, and tampering with the door?"
"Lor, love ye, no, Sir. But he made such a noise a fust—awful! And now he's as still as a corpse. And I did peep through the keyhole, and he was stretched stark."
"Hunger, perhaps," said the Comedian; "'tis his way when he has been kept fasting much over his usual hours. Follow me, Sophy." He put aside the woman, entered the sanded kitchen, ascended a stair that led from it; and Sophy following, stopped at a door and listened: not a sound, Timidly he unlocked the portals and crept in, when, suddenly, such a rush—such a spring, and a mass of something vehement yet soft, dingy yet whitish, whirled past the Actor, and came pounce against Sophy, who therewith uttered a shriek. "Stop him, stop him, for Heaven's sake!" cried Waife. "Shut the door below—seize him!" Down stairs, however, went the mass, and down stairs after it hobbled Waife, returning in a few moments with the recaptured and mysterious fugitive. "There," he cried, triumphantly, to Sophy, who, standing against the wall with her face buried in her frock, long refused to look up—"there—tame as a lamb, and knows me. See"—he seated himself on the floor, and Sophy, hesitatingly opening her eyes, beheld gravely gazing at her from under a profusion of shaggy locks an enormous—