"I should like to see how that poor woman's getting on, Johnny," he said to me one morning. "Suppose we go down to Gibraltar Terrace?" It was a dull, damp, misty day at the close of autumn; and when the Squire turned in at No. 60, after dismissing the cab, he stood still and stared, instead of knocking. A plate was on the door, "James Noak, carpenter and joiner." "Has she left, do you think, Johnny?" "Well, sir, we can ask. Perhaps the carpenter is only lodging here?" A tidy young woman, with a baby in her arms, answered the knock. "Does Mrs. Mapping live here still?" asked the Squire. "No, sir," she answered. "I don't know the name." "Not know the name!" retorted he, turning crusty; for he disliked, of all things, to be puzzled or thwarted. "Mrs. Mapping lived here for ten or a dozen years, anyhow." "Oh, stay, sir," she said, "I remember the name now. Mapping; yes, that was it. She lived here before we came in." "Is she dead?" "No, sir. She was sold up." "Sold up?" "Yes, sir. Her lodging-letting fell off--this neighbourhood's not what it was: people like to get further up, Islington way--and she was badly off for a long while, could not pay her rent, or anything; so at last the landlord was obliged to sell her up. At least, that's what we heard after we came here, but the house lay empty for some months between. I did not hear what became of her." The people at the next house could not tell anything; they were fresh-comers also; and the Squire stood in a quandary. I thought of Pitt the surgeon; he was sure to know; and ran off to his surgery in the next street. Changes seemed to be everywhere. Pitt's small surgery had given place to a chemist's shop. The chemist stood behind his counter in a white apron. Pitt? Oh, Pitt had taken to a practice further off, and drove his brougham. "Mrs. Mapping?" added the chemist, in further answer to me. "Oh yes, she lives still in the same terrace. She came to grief at No. 60, poor woman, and lodges now at No. 32. Same side of the way; this end." No. 32 had a plate on the door: "Miss Kester, dressmaker," and Miss Kester herself--a neat little woman, with a reserved, not to say sour, face and manner, and a cloud of pins sticking out of her brown waistband--answered the knock. She sent us up to a small back-room at the top of the house. Mrs. Mapping sat sewing near a fireless grate, her bed in one corner; she looked very ill. I had thought her thin enough before; she was a shadow now. The blue eyes had a piteous look in them, the cheeks a hectic. "Yes," she said, in answer to the Squire, her voice faint and her cough catching her every other minute, "it was a sad misfortune for me to be turned out of my house; it nearly broke my heart. The world is full of trouble, sir." "How long is it since?" "Nearly eighteen months, sir. Miss Kester had this room to let, and I came into it. It is quiet and cheap: only half-a-crown a-week."