ed, 'State your pleasure, madam.'

'It's not likely I well know,' said Flora, 'but it's possible and being
possible when I had the gratification of reading in the papers that you
had arrived from Italy and were going back I made up my mind to try it
for you might come across him or hear something of him and if so what a
blessing and relief to all!'

'Allow me to ask, madam,' said Mr Dorrit, with his ideas in wild
confusion, 'to whom--ha--To whom,' he repeated it with a raised voice in
mere desperation, 'you at present allude?'

'To the foreigner from Italy who disappeared in the City as no doubt you
have read in the papers equally with myself,' said Flora, 'not referring
to private sources by the name of Pancks from which one gathers what
dreadfully ill-natured things some people are wicked enough to whisper
most likely judging others by themselves and what the uneasiness
and indignation of Arthur--quite unable to overcome it Doyce and
Clennam--cannot fail to be.'

It happened, fortunately for the elucidation of any intelligible result,
that Mr Dorrit had heard or read nothing about the matter. This
caused Mrs Finching, with many apologies for being in great practical
difficulties as to finding the way to her pocket among the stripes of
her dress at length to produce a police handbill, setting forth that
a foreign gentleman of the name of Blandois, last from Venice, had
unaccountably disappeared on such a night in such a part of the city of
London; that he was known to have entered such a house, at such an hour;
that he was stated by the inmates of that house to have left it, about
so many minutes before midnight; and that he had never been beheld
since. This, with exact particulars of time and locality, and with
a good detailed description of the foreign gentleman who had so
mysteriously vanished, Mr Dorrit read at large.

'Blandois!' said Mr Dorrit. 'Venice! And this description! I know this
gentleman. He has been in my house. He is intimately acquainted with a
gentleman of good family (but in indifferent circumstances), of whom I
am a--hum--patron.'

'Then my humble and pressing entreaty is the more,' said Flora, 'that
in travelling back you will have the kindness to look for this foreign
gentleman along all the roads and up and down all the turnings and to
make inquiries for him at all the hotels and orange-trees and vineyards
and volcanoes and places for he must be somewhere and why doesn't he
come forward a