At last we came to the street, and I got down. It was near the railway station, and so all sorts of traffic poured past the place; shabby hackney cabs, omnibuses from the Chester hotels, vans of goods, all the miscellaneous stuff that pours into railway stations. The houses were a little back from the road, to be sure, with little “front gardens,” as the people call them. I walked past three or four times before I had screwed myself up to the point of going in. The thing that dissipated all my feelings of embarrassment in a moment, and brought me back to the eagerness and excitement with which I set out from home, was the sudden appearance of Mr. Luigi’s servant, the large, fat, good-humoured Italian, whom I have before mentioned, at the door of one of the houses. The sight of him flushed me at once into determination. I turned immediately to the house where he stood, and of course it was _the_ house, the number which Ellis had written down on his paper; there could be no doubts on the subject now. “I wish to see your mistress,” said I, going up to the man, too breathless and eager to waste any words. He looked at me with good-humoured scrutiny, repeating “Meestress” with a puzzled tone; at last a kind of gay, half-flattered confusion came over his good-humoured face, he put his hand on his heart, made a deprecatory, remonstrating bow, and burst into some laughing mixture of Italian and English, equally unintelligible. The fellow actually supposed I meant his sweetheart, or pretended to suppose so. I became very angry. He did not look impertinent either; but you may fancy how one would feel, to be supposed capable of such a piece of levity at such a time. And a person of my condition, too! Happily, at this moment the nurse-girl whom I had seen with my pretty young stranger suddenly made her appearance with the baby in her arms. I appealed to her, and though she stared and made answer in words not much more intelligible to me than her fellow-servant’s, she showed me upstairs. She was going out with the beautiful baby, but one way and another I was so worried and uncomfortable, and felt so strongly the existence of those plots against us which I was now going to clear up, that I took no notice of the child. I said nothing at all but that I wanted to see her mistress, and walked into the little drawing room without thinking I might be going into the young stranger’s presence, possibly into the presence of both husband and wife. However, the moment I had entered I saw her; there she was. In my heat and annoyance I went up to her instantly. “Young lady,” said I, “you were in the neighbourhood of my house yesterday; you were in our village; I myself saw you approaching the Park. You put some very strange questions to my servant. You must know how harassed and disturbed I have been by inquiries I don’t know the meaning of. What is it all about? What claim has your husband upon the Mortimers? Who is he? What does he want with us?”