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Nastasya, the cook and only servant, was rather pleased at the lodger's mood and had entirely given up sweeping and doing his room, only once a week or so she would stray into his room with a broom. She waked him up that day. "Get up, why are you asleep?" she called to him. "It's past nine, I have brought you some tea; will you have a cup? I should think you're fairly starving?"
And then, in what had been the lodger's sitting-room, Mrs. Bunting told her husband exactly what it was that had happened. He listened in heavy silence. "So you see," she said at last, "you see, Bunting, that 'twas me that was right after all. The lodger was never responsible for his actions. I never thought he was, for my part." And Bunting stared at her ruminatingly.
The two birds set up a tremendous singing and chorussing when Miss Cann, spying the occasion of the first-floor lodger's absence, begins practising her music-pieces. Such trills, roulades, and flourishes go on from the birds and the lodger! it is a wonder how any fingers can move over the jingling ivory so quickly as Miss Cann's.
"I am afraid, ma'am," says I, "that you have not hit on any little criminating discovery in the lodger's room?" She shook her head and sighed. It was a soft, languid, fluttering sigh and, upon my life, it quite upset me. For the moment I forgot business, and burned with envy of Mr. Yatman. "Don't despair, ma'am," I said, with an insinuating mildness which seemed to touch her.
Frost, snorting at the air in irrepressible disdain, actually snapped her fingers in her would-be lodger's face. "Rooms indeed! Go to Brighting!" Whereupon the abashed wheelman went, whether to Brighton, as the irate lady suggested, or to a warmer place unmentionable history sayeth not. But St.
The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric: estrats. Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your disposition.
There sat the schoolmaster, in conversation with a lady, whom the woman of the house, awed by her sternness and grandeur, had, out of regard to her lodger's feelings, shown into her parlour and not into his bedroom.
The lodger's curses changed in tone as the nights filed past, the blows diminished, the laughter became far more frequent. Cake, as rapidly reaching the end of her girlhood as the lodger was nearing the limits of his drink-sapped strength, redoubled her efforts. It was very plain to her that he could not live much longer; death in delirium tremens was inevitable.
In almost all the lodgings which we entered, with the landlord, Ivan Fedotitch, he said to us: "Here you need not write down the lodger's card yourself; there is a man here who can do it, if he only happens not to be intoxicated to-day." And Ivan Fedotitch called by name and patronymic this man, who was always one of those persons who had fallen from a lofty position.
A slight, dull color came up into the angles of the little lady's face, as she alluded to the upper lodger's room, for there was a tacit impression in the house and she knew it that if Miss Smalley and Mr. Sparrow had been thrown together earlier in life, it would have been very suitable; and that even now it might not be altogether too late. Another step went springing down.
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