“My gracious!” thought the landlady, “if they ain’t got another gal in there! ’Oo’d ’ave thought it, and the Sig-nor looking so grave and solemn the while? I was a green’orn to have believed as they would ’ave been satisfied with Hannah between the two. That’s the Doctor’s doings, I’ll be bound! Them medicals are hup to heverythink. ’Ow did ’e smuggle the ’ussy in under my very eyes? In an ’amper, I suppose, which no more comes into my ’ouse. And I, who ’ave tried so ’ard to keep it quiet and respectable! I’ll ‘Nora’ them, when we meets again. And as for that there Hannah, ’ome she goes to-morrer.” Mrs. Battleby, having applied her ear again to the keyhole, and heard Steinberg speak of “Mrs. Carlile,” and being convinced that the villainies going on were not confined to unmarried girls, bundled downstairs shaking with indignation, and began to seek industriously for pen, ink and paper, wherewith to inscribe a letter to Mrs. Stubbs of Settlefield. She was some time before she found what she sought, letter-writing not being an every-day habit with her. At last, however, in a corner of the kitchen dresser, she unearthed the penny bottle of ink, which had remained there, without a cork, a couple of months, and been well thickened by the addition of a dozen flies, and in a drawer of the same article of furniture she discovered a steel pen with only one nib, with which she scratched as with a pin, on a dirty half sheet of paper, the following words, “Dear Mrs. Stubbs, “If you will please to come to London tomorrer, and fetch ’ome your daughter Hannah, I shall be obliged, as there is goings on hupstairs wich I don’t approve of, and I’m afraid she ain’t no good with the gentlemen. “Your loving friend, “Martha Battleby.” The consternation which this mysterious epistle caused in the cottage home in Settlefield, may be better imagined than described. Mrs. Stubbs, who was a laundress, and trying hard, with the assistance of her husband, to keep five or six hungry mouths full, was like many ignorant country people, excessively stern upon a lapse from Virtue. These brawny-armed daughters of the soil, who are spoilt for love-making before they are five-and-twenty--who deteriorate in every direction as soon as they become mothers, and remain like sacks of meal for ever afterwards--are invariably unable to understand how any women can be tempted to deviate from the straight and narrow path, from which they have never had the opportunity to swerve by so much as a hair’s breadth. When Mary Stubbs therefore received Martha Battleby’s letter and had mastered its contents, she was more than angry with her recreant daughter.