rfield had given
him, griped tight in his crooked fingers, in his breeches' pocket--no
change in his grim and sinister face--no turn of the head--no side
glance of the eye--all dark, rigid, and tense.

The mechanism of long habit brought him round the corner to the door of
the Salmon House, the 'public' facing, but with the length of the street
interposing, the Phoenix, whose lights were visible through and under
the branches of the village tree. His mind wandered back to the Mills
with a shock, and glided stealthily past the Brass Castle without
dwelling there, and he looked down the street. Over the bridge at the
Elms, lay death in its awful purity. At his left, in the Gray Stone
House, was Doctor Sturk--the witness with sealed lips--the victim of
Charles Archer's mysterious prowess; and behind lay the church-yard,
and the quiet little church with that vault and nameless coffin.
Altogether, the suggestions and associations about him were not cheerful
or comfortable. He squeezed the silver--Dangerfield's little
remembrance--with a furious strain, and ground his teeth.

'I'm like a man surrounded. I wish I was out of it all!' he muttered,
with a care-worn glance.

So he entered the public-house.

There was not much business doing. Three friends, Smithfield dealers, or
some such folk, talking loudly over their liquor of prices and
prospects; and one fat fellow, by the fire, smoking a pipe, with a large
glass of punch at his elbow.

'Ah, then, Mr. Irons, an' is it yourself that's in it? and where in the
world wor ye all this time?' said the landlady.

'Business, Ma'am, business, Mrs. Molloy.'

'An' there's your chair waitin' for you beside the fire, Mr. Irons, this
month an' more--a cowld evening--and we all wondherin' what in the wide
world was gone widg ye--this I do'no how long.'

'Thank ye, Ma'am--a pipe and a glass o' punch.'

Irons was always a man of few words, and his laconics did not strike
Mistress Molloy as anything very strange. So she wiped the little table
at his side, and with one foot on the fender, and his elbow on his knee,
he smoked leisurely into the fire-place.

To look at his face you would have supposed he was thinking; but it was
only that sort of foggy vacuity which goes by the name of 'a brown
study.' He never thought very clearly or connectedly; and his apathetic
reveries, when his mood was gloomy, were furnished forth in a barren and
monotonous way, with only two or three frightful