"Why, here is mystery and romance with a vengeance! ready made, too, at one's threshold, without having to seek it out in hall or bower. 'Tis a trifle _low_ to be sure; had it been a shepherd and shepherdess it _might_ do, but a milkman and a--may I say?--milkmaid." "I assure you there is no quiz whatever in it. It is just as you see it and say it--a downright mystery, and one that, perhaps, will never be cleared up." "I think the clue, my dear fellow, a very simple one--the woman is mad." "Not a bit of it; she is perfectly rational; of intelligence, I am told, far beyond her apparent station in life--a little reserved, to be sure." "Then he is a lunatic, and she his keeper--eh?" "For that I refer you to the cook, and all of that respectable calling who transact business with the fellow. If he must be characterized by any one particular quality, I would say that there is far more of the villain than the fool about him." "Pray, be kind enough," I said, "to tell me all you know respecting this curious Pair. I am really interested in them." "In what I have said already," replied Sainsbury, resuming his seat, "I have told you all, or very nearly all, that I, or I believe any body else, knows of them. My little information is chiefly acquired from hearing the servants gossip about them; but I very well remember that, on the first appearance of the Pair in this vicinity, they excited a good deal of speculation and enquiry amongst every class in Walworth. It is now more than eight years ago since this man's predecessor--the purveyor, as he grandiloquently was wont to call himself, of milk to this large district--died. His dairies, which I fancy were lucrative things enough, were immediately sold, and taken by a person who, we were informed, would not only continue to supply Walworth with their produce, but, from motives of caprice or economy, would deliver it himself. Accordingly, the man you have seen pass this evening appeared; and all was uniform and punctual as before. In a few days, however, he came, attended by that mysterious female, dogged precisely as you have seen him an hour ago, and at once the heart of every cook and kitchen-maid in the parish was on fire with curiosity and suspicion. From the kitchen the contagion spread to the drawing-room, and commissions of enquiry, in the shape of tea-parties, were held in every house relative to the strange milk-vender and his stranger shadow. To those who asked him any questions on the matter, and very few ventured to do so--for his manner, though civil, had reserve and sullenness, and there was in his deportment a decent propriety, that repulsed, or rather prevented, enquiry--he usually answered that he 'knew nothing of the woman who followed him;' 'that he dared to say it was from some whim;' 'that she was welcome to do so if she pleased;' 'she had the same right of highway as any other person,' and suchlike evasive replies."