and orderly assembly of idle people had collected on the
pavement to see the gentlemen alight, to watch them go into the house,
to stare at the inkstand, to wonder at the Address, to observe that Mr.
Thorpe's page wore his best livery, and that Mr. Thorpe's housemaid had
on new cap-ribbons and her Sunday gown. After the street door had
been closed, and these various objects for popular admiration had
disappeared, there still remained an attraction outside in the square,
which addressed itself to the general ear. One of the footmen in
attendance on the carriages, had collected many interesting particulars
about the Deputation and the Testimonial, and while he related them in
regular order to another footman anxious for information, the small and
orderly public of idlers stood round about, and eagerly caught up any
stray words explanatory of the ceremonies then in progress inside the
house, which fell in their way.

One of the most attentive of these listeners was a swarthy-complexioned
man with bristling whiskers and a scarred face, who had made one of the
assembly on the pavement from the moment of its first congregating.
He had been almost as much stared at by the people about him as the
Deputation itself; and had been set down among them generally as a
foreigner of the most outlandish kind: but, in plain truth, he was
English to the back-bone, being no other than Matthew Grice.

Mat's look, as he stood listening among his neighbors, was now just as
quietly vigilant, his manner just as gruffly self-possessed, as usual.
But it had cost him a hard struggle that morning, in the solitude of
one of his longest and loneliest walks, to compose himself--or, in his
favorite phrase, to "get to be his own man again."

From the moment when he had thrown the lock of hair into the fire, to
the moment when he was now loitering at Mr. Thorpe's door, _he_ had
never doubted, whatever others might have done, that the man who had
been the ruin of his sister, and the man who was the nearest blood
relation of the comrade who shared his roof, and lay sick at that moment
in his bed, were one and the same. Though he stood now, amid the casual
street spectators, apparently as indolently curious as the most careless
among them--looking at what they looked at, listening to what they
listened to, and leaving the square when they left it--he was resolved
all the time to watch his first opportunity of entering Mr. Thorpe's
house that very day; res