"Who asked for references?" tartly demanded Mrs. Jones, not a whit more courteous to him, her lodger in prospective, than she was to others. "Time enough to speak of references when you're told they're wanted. Little Jenner has often talked of you. Take up the money, if you please." "But I prefer to pay my rent in advance," said Mr. Brown. "It has been my custom to do so where I am." He spoke decisively, in a tone that admitted of no appeal, and Mrs. Jones caught up the money with a jerk and put it loose in her pocket. Saying he would let her know the time of his entrance, which might probably be on the following evening, he wished her goodnight, and departed: leaving an impression on his future landlady that his voice was in some way not altogether unfamiliar to her. "I'm not as 'cute in remembering faces as Alletha is," acknowledged Mrs. Jones to herself, while she watched him down the street from the front door, "but I'll back my ears against hers for voices any day. Not lately; I hardly think that; it's more like a remembrance of the far past. Still I don't remember his face. Heard him speak perhaps in some railway train; or----Goodness heart alive! Is it _you?_" This sudden break was occasioned by the appearance of another gentleman, who seemed to have sprung from nowhere, until he halted close before her. It was the detective officer, Butterby: and Mrs. Jones had not seen him since she quitted her country home. "I thought it looked like you," cried Mr. Butterby, giving his hand. "Says I to myself, as I strolled along, 'If that's not the exact image of my old friend, Mrs. Jones, it's uncommon like her. It _is_ you, ma'am! And how are you? So you are living in this quarter!" Crafty man! Mrs. Jones had assuredly dealt him a box on the ear could she have divined that he was deceiving her. He had been watching her house for some minutes past, knowing just as well as she did that it was hers. Mrs. Jones invited him indoors, and he went under protest, not wishing, he said, to intrude: but the going indoors was what he intended doing all along. They sat gossiping of old times and new. Mr. Butterby took a friendly glass of beer and a biscuit; Mrs. Jones, knitting always, took none. Without seeming to be at all anxious for the information, he had speedily gathered in every particular about Roland Yorke that there was to gather. Not too charitably disposed to the world in general, in speech at any rate, Mrs. Jones yet spoke well of Roland. "He is no more like the proud, selfish aristocrat he used to be than chalk's like cheese," she said. "In his younger days Roland Yorke thought the world was made for him and his pleasure, no matter who else suffered: he doesn't think it now." "Sowed his wild oats, has he?" remarked Mr. Butterby. "For the matter of wild oats, I never knew he had any particular ones to sow," retorted Mrs. Jones. "Whether or not, he has got none left, that I can see."