Anyhow, it must be recorded how Ned took to haunting--with the persistent casualness of one whose unattainable mistress is, as suggested by his preoccupied manner, the thing farthest from his thoughts--the neighbourhood of a certain house in Bury St Edmunds. This house--a dignified, two-storeyed, red-brick building, with a stiff white porch standing out into the road, and, on the floor above the porch, five tall windows looking arrogantly down from behind a green balcony at the lesser lights in the barber’s and fruiterer’s shops opposite--was situate, about the middle of the town, on a slope known as Abbey Hill, and had for actual neighbour a chief hotel, the Angel, then pretty newly built. It faced--across that sort of homely _place_, or town quadrangle, that is so usual a feature in English old market boroughs--a flaked and hoary Norman tower that had once been the gateway to a graveyard long since passed with its dead into the limbo of memories. Madame la gouvernante could see the solemn eyebrows of this very doyen of antiquity bent upon her as she sat at the second _déjeuner_, and it made her nervous. Sometimes, even, she would send a servant to half close the blinds of the window over against her. “One cannot evade oneself of its senile addresses,” she said on a certain occasion to a florid gentleman in black, who had come down from London to be her particular guest for a while. “I feel like Vesta being made the courted of an old Time. It is always heere the mummy at the feast.” The gentleman laughed. “Egad!” said he. “It is to illustrate how Time stands still with madame the Countess of Genlis; and, as to the mummy, why, a mummy is but dust, and dust is easy to lay”--and he took a great pull from a bumper beside him. He drank brandy-and-water with his meat. “’Tis this country appetite,” he would say. “Violent diseases need violent remedies;” but by-and-by he would take his share of the port and madeira with the rest. Now he looked across the table to a little shy lady, and, says he, but speaking in very bad French, “Mademoiselle the princess, as I dissipate myself of this shadow, so may you as readily of that that magnifies itself to the eyes of madame the countess.” He opened his own eyes as he spoke, comically, to imply some imaginary vision of terror. He was very proud of these orbs, that were large and liquid. Indeed, he never allowed the well that replenished them to run dry. “_Est-ce bien possible_! fie, then, Mr Sherree-den!” put in a very little voice--not of the lady addressed--from farther down the table. “But mademoiselle takes water with her wine.” Madame tapped on her plate with her fan, uttering an exclamation of reproval. But the gentleman only laughed again. “Miss Rogue, Miss Pamela,” said he, being by this time secure of his priming, “I will compliment you and your wit on making a very pretty couple.” “We are twins,” said the girl saucily. “We were found together on a doorstep.”