Nor were they satisfied with this. When they reached a little town, the old gentleman with the yellow face sent for a bricklayer, gave him some orders in a low tone, and wrote down an address upon a piece of paper. The younger one talked for half-an-hour with the landlady in the bar, and next morning paid her four pounds nine shillings more than his own bill. That was a happy day for the poor people of the cottage on which Charles Marston and his old companion broke down upon the heath. CHAPTER VIII. There is a small house in the purlieus of fashion, surrounded on every side by mansions five times as big as itself. You know it quite well, dear reader--you have passed it a dozen times or more, and looked up and wondered what it did there, surrounded as it is by the mansions of ancient aristocracy; for the part of the town in which it is situated is not one of the new rookeries of new people which have risen up to the south-west and north-west of the capital, upon spots that were fields within these thirty years. It is tall, and thin, and brown, like a spinster of a certain age at a county ball, amongst a row of bland and brilliant dowagers--quite the sort of house, in short, which the wonderful George Robins would have advertised for sale as "a unique bachelor's residence, situate in the very heart of the fashionable world, commanding advantages rarely met with singly, but never, perhaps, united, except in this most charming abode." Nevertheless, it was not the residence of a bachelor at all, nor of a married man, nor of a spinster, old or young. It was the town house (and indeed the only house) of a very excellent and respectable widow lady, with a moderate income and the best intentions in the world, but not the best wits to guide them. Having spoken of her income, I must make that matter quite clear. She had just seven hundred a-year, and would not, indeed, have had that, had it not been for the care and circumspection of a very prudent brother, who had interfered to see the affairs of her marriage settlement properly conducted.