For suddenly the girl stopped outside the doorway below, and beckoned imperiously to her companion. She said a few sharp words to him, and the pair upstairs felt the swing-door of the restaurant open and shut. Lucy, forgetting her weakness, ran eagerly to the sitting-room door and listened. There was a sound of raised voices below, and then the door at the foot of the stairs opened, and Daddy was heard shouting. 'There--go along upstairs. My daughter, she'll speak to you. And don't you come back this way--a man can't be feeding Manchester and taking strangers about, all in the same twinkling of an eye, you know, not unless he happens to have a few spare bodies handy, which ain't precisely my case. My daughter 'll tell you what you want to know, and show you out by the private door. Dora!' Dora stood waiting rather nervously at the sitting-room door. The girl came up first, the old man behind her, bewildered and groping his way. 'We're strangers here--we want somebody to show us the way. We've been to the book-shop in Half Street, and they sent us on here. They were just brutes to us at that book-shop,' said the girl, with a vindictive emphasis and an imperious self-possession which fairly paralysed Lucy and Dora. Lucy's eyes, moreover, were riveted on her face, on its colour, its fineness of feature, its brilliance and piercingness of expression. And what was the extraordinary likeness in it to something familiar? 'Why!' said Dora, in a little cry, 'aren't you Mr. David Grieve's sister?' For she had traced the likeness before Lucy. 'Oh, it must be!' 'Well, I am his sister, if you want to know,' said the stranger, looking astonished in her turn. 'He wrote to me to come up. And I lent the letter to uncle to read--that's his uncle--and he went and lost it somehow, fiddling about the fields while I was putting my things together. And then we couldn't think of the proper address there was in it--only the name of a man Purcell, in Half Street, that David said he'd been with for two years. So we went there to ask; and, _my!_--weren't they rude to us! There was an ugly black man there chivied us out in no time--wouldn't tell us anything. But as I was shutting the door the shopman whispered to me, "Try the Parlour--Market Place." So we came on here, you see.' And she stared about her, at the room, and at the girls, taking in everything with lightning rapidity--the embroidery frame, Lucy's veil and fashionably cut jacket, the shabby furniture, the queer old pictures. 'Please come in,' said Dora civilly, 'and sit down. If you're strangers here, I'll just put on my hat and take you round. Mr. Grieve's a friend of ours. He's in Potter Street. You'll find him nicely settled by now. This is my cousin, Mr. Purcell's daughter.' And she ran upstairs, leaving Lucy to grapple with the new-comers. The two girls sat down, and eyed each other. Reuben stood patiently waiting. 'Is the man at Half Street your father?' asked the new-comer, abruptly.