ssity imposed on him by his present design, was to devise the means
of secretly opening the painter's bureau; the second was to hit on
some safe method--should no chance opportunity occur--of approaching it
unobserved. Mat had remarked that Mr. Blyth wore the key of the bureau
attached to his watch chain; and Mat had just heard from young Thorpe
that Mr. Blyth was about to pay them a visit in Kirk Street. On the
evening of that visit, therefore, the first of the two objects--the
discovery of a means of secretly opening the bureau--might, in some way,
be attained. How?

This was the problem which Mat set off to solve to his own perfect
satisfaction, in the silence and loneliness of a long night's walk.

In what precise number of preliminary mental entanglements he involved
himself; before arriving at the desired solution, it would not be very
easy to say. As usual, his thoughts wandered every now and then from
his subject in the most irregular manner; actually straying away, on one
occasion as far as the New World itself; and unintelligibly occupying
themselves with stories he had heard, and conversations he had held
in various portions of that widely-extended sphere, with vagabond
chance-comrades from all parts of civilized Europe. How his mind
ever got back from these past times and foreign places to present
difficulties and future considerations connected with the guest who was
expected in Kirk Street, Mat himself would have been puzzled to tell.
But it did eventually get back, nevertheless; and, what was still more
to the purpose, it definitely and thoroughly worked out the intricate
problem that had been set it to solve.

Not a whispered word of the plan he had now hit on dropped from Mat's
lips, as, turning it this way and that in his thoughts, he walked
briskly back to town in the first fresh tranquillity of the winter
morning. Discreet as he was, however, either some slight practical hints
of his present project must have oozed out through his actions when he
got back to London; or his notion of the sort of hospitable preparation
which ought to be made for the reception of Mr. Blyth, was more
barbarously and extravagantly eccentric than all the rest of his notions
put together.

Instead of going home at once, when he arrived at Kirk Street, he
stopped at certain shops in the neighborhood to make some purchases
which evidently had reference to the guest of the evening; for the first
things he bought were two o