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The boys well knew that if blood were unlet till the bragging, hot little rogue of a Barney stained his record, they would all forget the color of a wound. It was not without some elemental enthusiasm that the camp, one evening, extended its welcome to a mule-driver newly mustered to their company. The sobriquet by which the man was duly introduced was Slivers.
"Why are you so very anxious we should go to live at St. Andrews?" The young fellow blushed all over his kindly eager face, and then frankly owned he had a motive. His grandmother's cottage, which she had left him, the youngest and her pet always, was now unlet.
Naturally there is no sympathy between the villagers and the keepers sent from a distance to protect the game, so that the shooting may be let to some other stranger. On the contrary, they religiously destroy every nest they can find, with the result that there are too few birds for anyone to take the shooting, and it remains year after year unlet.
"So the house is still unlet?" he said. "Yes, sir, and is likely to remain so, I apprehend. The lease, as I understand, falls in a very few years hence, and the landlord is unwilling to make any outlay on the house, which will probably then be pulled down; while no tenant, I opine, would be willing to rent a residence so wanting in modern decoration and modern conveniences.
But he was not looking at the shaded portion over which the clerk's pencil was straying; instead he was regarding the fact that across the corresponding portion of the plan was written in red ink the words, "Mr. Frank Burchill." The third portion was blank; it, apparently, was unlet. "That is really about the size of flat I want," said Triffitt, musingly. "What's the rent of that, now?"
Pentecoste, an eccentric old lady, had lived there for many years, and had died in the middle of a game of patience; her worn and tattered furniture had been sold at auction, and the house had remained unlet for a considerable period because people in the town said that the ghost of Mrs. The Ronders cared nothing for ghosts; the house was exactly what they wanted.
Immediately beneath this house, however, there was an empty unlet shop, which I could not help regarding with a suspicious eye, from an apprehension that it might be taken by a person of some noisy calling or other; and so much at last did this fear alarm me, that I determined on taking the shop into my own hands, and running myself the risk of its letting thus securing the choice of a tenant.
Their rooms, moreover, were still unlet. Her anxieties therefore were many, and it was with lively expectation that she watched the 'swells' grope their way upstairs to Mr. Fenwick's room. She always knew it must come right some day, with people like that about. Lord Findon and Eugénie mounted the stairs. The studio door was half-open. As they approached the threshold they heard Fenwick speaking.
No one knew to whom the furniture belonged, some curious speculators avowing that Plon had a child a girl at school in Normandy, and had collected it as part of her dowry; others that some mysterious tie of gratitude bound him to the owner. Whoever was right or wrong, the rooms remained closed and unlet. The garret itself was inhabited by a young widow, whose story was sufficiently sad.
It was a grocer's and, as soon as they alighted from their horses, its owner came out and greeted them heartily. "Madame and monsieur are both most welcome," he said. "I have received a letter from my cousin Simon. I am glad, indeed, to receive his friends. Fortunately our rooms upstairs are unlet. Strangers are rare in Paris, at present."
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