He was all unconscious of the eyes that were upon him; but some one approaching made him turn his head, and he saw several persons watching him curiously from the door of the inn, while others, plain country people in smocks and highlows, muttered to one another as they stared from the pavement. “Won’t you please to step in, sir?” said the man who came forward, a short, square-faced individual, in a black calico apron and a white hat. “Who lives in that house?” returned Holdsworth, pointing down the road. “That one yonder, with the chimbley looking this way? Why, I don’t think anybody’s living in it just now, although I did hear that it was taken by a party from Ashford.--Emily!” he called. A stout, well-looking woman elbowed her way out of the tavern, and stood on the lower step. “The gentleman wants to know who lives in that house at the bottom.” “It’s to let. Mr. Markham has the letting of it,” answered the woman. “His is the shop yonder,” said the man. “You’ll see ‘Undertaker and Joiner’ wrote over the door.” “I’ll send a boy to fetch him, if you like,” said the woman. “I’ll goa, missus,” remarked an old man in a long blouse, turning about on his stick in his eagerness to earn a glass of yale. “No, I don’t want him,” said Holdsworth. “Won’t you step in and rest yourself, sir?” exclaimed the woman, exerting the seductive smile with which she was wont to greet every passenger who stopped at her door. Holdsworth hesitated a moment, as though there were a magic in the little distant house that constrained him to keep his eyes upon it, and then entered the tavern, heralded by the landlady, and followed by the landlord. The parlour into which he was conducted was as quiet and private as he could wish, screened by a red curtain across the glass of the door from the bar, with a window opening on to a square of ground well stocked with shrubs and vegetables. The sunshine streamed into the room, and lighted up the queer ornaments on the mantelpiece, the fine old china hanging upon rows of hooks in a mahogany cabinet, the well-worn carpet, the velvet sofa, the black bottles and glittering tankards on the shelves of the sideboard. The landlord went behind the bar to look after some besmocked gentry who were drinking in front of it, leaving his wife to attend to Holdsworth. “What might you like to order, sir?” she inquired, presenting herself at a side door. He asked her to bring him some wine and biscuits, saying that he had no appetite now, but would dine or sup later on. He looked at her very attentively as he spoke, with an idea in his mind that he had seen her before.