oked
up very angrily on being jostled so unceremoniously, started and changed
colour when he saw the face of the offender. "Saints in heaven!" he
murmured almost audibly, "what a look of that woman; and yet--no--it is
gone!"

"Who is that gentleman?" he asked abruptly, as he paid for his book.

The shopman smiled, but answered, "I don't know, sir."

"That's a lie! You would never bow so low to a man you did not know!"

The shopman smiled again. "Why, sir, there are many who come to this
house who don't wish us to know them."

"Ah, I understand; you are political publishers,--afraid of libels, I
dare say. Always the same thing in this cursed country; and then they
tell us we are 'free!' So I suppose that gentleman has written something
William Pitt does not like. But William Pitt--ha--he's dead! Very true,
so he is! Sir, this little book seems most excellent; but in my time, a
man would have been sent to Newgate for printing it." While thus running
on, Mr. Tomkins had edged himself pretty close to the recess within
which the last-comer had disappeared; and there, seated on a high stool,
he contrived to read and to talk at the same time, but his eye and his
ear were both turned every instant towards the recess.

The shopman, little suspecting that in so very eccentric, garrulous
a person he was permitting a spy to encroach upon the secrets of the
house, continued to make up sundry parcels of the new publication which
had so enchanted his customer, while he expatiated on the prodigious
sensation the book had created, and while the customer himself had
already caught enough of the low conversation within the recess to be
aware that the author of the book was the very person who had so roused
his curiosity.

Not till that gentleman, followed to the door by the polite publisher,
had quitted the shop, did Mr. Tomkins put this volume in his pocket,
and, with a familiar nod at the shopman, take himself off.

He was scarcely in the street when he saw Percival St. John leaning out
of his cabriolet and conversing with the author he had discovered.
He halted a moment irresolute; but the young man, in whom our reader
recognizes John Ardworth, declining St. John's invitation to accompany
him to Brompton, resumed his way through the throng; the cabriolet drove
on; and Mr. Tomkins, though with a graver mien and a steadier step,
continued his desultory rambles. Meanwhile, John Ardworth strode
gloomily back to his lonely chamber.