At length the patience of Mrs. Sandboys became exhausted; for, though it was hardly daylight, she felt satisfied they would be hours too late for the ceremony, unless the tedious operation of shaving could be immediately performed by her husband; and the lady accordingly insisted that Mr. Sandboys should slip on his trousers and proceed to the maid’s door, with the view of rousing the sluggard from her slumbers. She would go herself, she said, but swarming as the establishment was with foreigners, and considering her late perilous adventure with one of the French lodgers, she did not consider it prudent to hazard a repetition of the circumstances. Cursty therefore proceeded to do the bidding of his wife, and groping his way in the twilight—for it was not yet morning—to the apartment of their serving-maid, he mounted the stairs as softly as he could, so that he might not alarm the other sleepers in the house. On gaining the landing that led to Ann Lightfoot’s room, the sounds of a gentle tapping caught Mr. Sandboys’ ear, and in the dusk he could just perceive the figure of a man standing outside the door. He paused for a minute, and then heard the individual, as he softly repeated the tapping, request, in broken English, that the “angel” would get up and heat him a flat iron at the kitchen fire. Now Mr. Sandboys had been informed by the partner of his fortunes and four-poster of the pattern of a huge pair of moustachios, in black wax, having been discovered imprinted on the cheek of Ann Lightfoot, after her late visit to the Frenchmen’s apartment, and no sooner heard the term “angel” applied to the maid, than immediately a shrewd suspicion flashed across his mind, that the individual then at the girl’s door was none other than the owner of the original moustachios, of which Ann had borne away so faithful a copy. In an instant he made a rush at the hirsute gentleman, and, seizing him by the shoulders, proceeded to shake him violently, and to rate him in no very gentle terms, threatening to throw the scoundrel over the stairs. The proprietor of the moustachios immediately grew as indignant as the hot-blooded native of Cumberland, and declaring, with several violent taps of his bosom, that his honour had been mortally wounded, demanded the gentleman’s card, in order that he might obtain satisfaction for the insult.