They followed their luggage down into the hall; but as she went, at every step, the lady looked around her. She dreaded the sight of that porter of the night; she feared lest some potential authority of the hotel should come to her and ask her some horrid question; but of all her fears her greatest fear was that there should arise before her an apparition of that face which she had seen recumbent on its pillow. As they passed the door of the great salon, Mr. Brown looked in. “Why, there it is still!” said he. “What?” said she, trembling in every limb. “The mustard pot.” “They have put it in there since,” she exclaimed, energetically, in her despair. “But never mind. The omnibus is here. Come away.” And she absolutely took him by the arm. But at that moment a door behind them opened, and Mrs. Brown heard herself called by her name. And there was the night porter--with a handkerchief in his hand. But the further doings of that morning must be told in a farther chapter. CHAPTER IV. MRS. BROWN DOES ESCAPE. It had been visible to Mrs. Brown from the first moment of her arrival on the ground floor that “something was the matter,” if we may be allowed to use such a phrase; and she felt all but convinced that this something had reference to her. She fancied that the people of the hotel were looking at her as she swallowed, or tried to swallow, her coffee. When her husband was paying the bill there was something disagreeable in the eye of the man who was taking the money. Her sufferings were very great, and no one sympathized with her. Her husband was quite at his ease, except that he was complaining of the cold. When she was anxious to get him out into the carriage, he still stood there, leisurely arranging shawl after shawl around his throat. “You can do that quite as well in the omnibus,” she had just said to him, very crossly, when there appeared upon the scene through a side door that very night porter whom she dreaded with a soiled pocket-handkerchief in his hand. [Illustration]