Then she slowly turned indoors, and her home seemed very solitary. We
can accustom ourselves to loneliness, but we should beware of infringing
the custom. Once admit two or three faces seated at your hearthside,
or gazing out from your windows on the laughing sun, and when they are
gone, they carry off the glow from your grate and the sunbeam from your
panes. Poor Mrs. Saunders! in vain she sought to rouse herself, to put
the rooms to rights, to attend to the chickens to distract her thoughts.
The one-eyed cripple, the little girl, the shaggy-faced dog, still
haunted her; and when at noon she dined all alone off the remnants of
the last night's social supper, the very click of the renovated clock
seemed to say, "Gone, gone;" and muttering, "Ah! gone," she reclined
back on her chair, and indulged herself in a good womanlike cry. From
this luxury she was startled by a knock at the door. "Could they have
come back?" No; the door opened, and a genteel young man, in a black
coat and white neckcloth, stepped in.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am--your name 's Saunders--sell poultry?"

"At your service, sir. Spring chickens?" Poor people, whatever their
grief, must sell their chickens, if they have any to sell.

"Thank you, ma'am; not at this moment. The fact is, that I call to make
some inquiries Have not you lodgers here?"

Lodgers! at that word the expanding soul of Mrs. Saunders reclosed
hermetically; the last warning of Waife revibrated in her ears this
white neckclothed gentleman, was he not a rat?

"No, sir, I ha'n't no lodgers."

"But you have had some lately, eh? a crippled elderly man and a little
girl."

"Don't know anything about them; leastways," said Mrs. Saunders,
suddenly remembering that she was told less to deny facts than to send
inquirers upon wrong directions, "leastways, at this blessed time. Pray,
sir, what makes you ask?"

"Why, I was instructed to come down to ------, and find out where this
person, one William Waife, had gone. Arrived yesterday, ma'am. All I
could hear is, that a person answering to his description left the place
several days ago, and had been seen by a boy, who was tending sheep, to
come down the lane to your house, and you were supposed to have lodgers
(you take lodgers sometimes, I think, ma'am), because you had been
buying some trifling articles of food not in your usual way of custom.
Circumstantial evidence, ma'am: you can have no motive to conceal the
truth."

"I should t