At sight of the English baronet’s conspicuous figure, stooping to enter, and scarce venturing to stand erect within, the bootmaker had looked up with an absolute scowl of astonishment; showing a strongly-marked haggard visage, rendered the more singularly unprepossessing, despite something of the vivid southern tint and classic decisiveness, by a head close-cropped, in all its native soot-blackness, and a chin left roughly tufted below, although the lean tanned cheek had not yet lost altogether its air of youth. Sir Godfrey’s first feeling had been one of pity, mingled with sudden pleasure in the commission he had to perform; their perfect want of manners, their very poverty, the absence of any other apartment to withdraw into, joined to the motionless silence of the elderly woman in her arm-chair, who neither seemed to hear nor see him, all increased it to a kind of embarrassment. In the highest drawing-rooms in Europe, nay, in any peasant’s cottage of his own country, Sir Godfrey would have felt immeasurably more at ease than he then stood, hat in hand, in the attic of these Parisian work-people. He had hardly begun to address the person before him, too, as Madame, ere the child’s fretfulness in the arms of its little nurse became a vociferous squall, to which the elder woman turned her head slowly, with an air of distress, her features working, her body moving and rocking in her chair, as she made a humming, hushing sound to the infant. Its mother snatched it next moment from the girl’s arms, with an angry exclamation. “Why do you remain here under such pretences?” said she, sharply; and the look of early cunning had betrayed itself on the girl’s face by her attempt to seem absorbed in the child, with the hanging of the head that succeeded. “Favour me, little Pochon, by leaving us alone,” continued the young woman, following her as she slunk out: “Widow Pochon is too good, inform her!” And she slammed to the fragile door, then returned near the visitor, with her infant quietly held to the breast: she was not much more than twenty, and had well-shaped features, that, with a happier expression, might have been attractive; but in this slatternly attire and attitude, her careless presence was doubly disagreeable to Sir Godfrey.