It was in a street of a third or fourth-rate rank, called Stafford Street, that Bicknell's servant now stopped, and having made more than one inquiry as to name and number, at last knocked at the door of a sombre-looking, ruinous old house, whose windows, broken or patched with paper, bespoke an air of poverty and destitution. A child in a ragged and neglected dress opened the door, and answering to the question “If Mr. Bicknell were there,” in the affirmative, led Linwood up stairs creaking as they went with rottenness and decay. “You 're to rap there, and he 'll come to you,” said the child, as they reached the landing, where two doors presented themselves; and so saying, she slipped noiselessly and stealthily down the stairs, leaving him alone in the gloomy lobby. Linwood was not without astonishment at the place in which he found himself; but there was no time for the indulgence of such a feeling, and he knocked, at first gently, and then, as no answer came, more loudly, and at last when several minutes elapsed, without any summons to enter, he tapped sharply at the panel with his cane. Still there was no reply; the deep silence of the old house seemed like that of a church at midnight; not a sound was heard to break it. There was a sense of dreariness and gloom over the ruinous spot and the fast-closing twilight that struck Linwood deeply; and it is probable, had the mission with which he was intrusted been one of less moment than his master seemed to think it, that Linwood would quietly have descended the stairs, and deferred his interview with Mr. Bicknell to a more suitable time and place. He had come, however, bent on fulfilling his charge; and so, after waiting what he believed to be half an hour, and which might possibly have been five or ten minutes, he applied his hand to the lock, and entered the room. It was a large, low-ceilinged apartment, whose moth-eaten furniture seemed to rival with the building itself, and which, though once not without some pretension to respectability, was now crumbling to decay, or coarsely mended by some rude hand. A door, not quite shut, led into an inner apartment; and from this room the sound of voices proceeded, whose conversation in all probability had prevented Linwood's summons from being heard. Whether the secret instincts of his calling were the prompter,--for Linwood was a valet,--or that the strange circumstances in which he found himself had suggested a spirit of curiosity, but Linwood approached the door and peeped in. The sin of eaves-dropping, like most other sins, would seem only difficult at the first step; the subsequent ones came easily, for, as the listener established himself in a position to hear what went forward, he speedily became interested in what he heard.