The audience made a rush to follow, but Digby Martin, the magician, placed himself before the doorway and informed them that he could assure them there was no more fun to be had out of the lady and gentleman who had just retired, and that he would show them something ten times funnier than what they had just seen; whereupon Paul quietly took his leave, and made the best of his way to the Railway Tavern, where he found Mrs. Dibble had just arrived with her husband. Mrs. Dibble was in tears, and Dibble was talking to her rather loudly and in an authoritative tone; but half an hour afterwards they were all sitting quietly down to refreshment, and Mrs. Dibble’s journey having ended in finding her husband, Paul now proposed to leave them in order to catch the mail for Avonworth. Mrs. Dibble thanked him for his kindness, and said she had no further need, she thought, to trespass upon him; so he bade them adieu, and went off laughing to the railway station. CHAPTER VII. IN WHICH MR. SHUFFLETON GIBBS PRESENTS HIMSELF IN ANOTHER CHARACTER. Amongst the audience who had witnessed the amusing encounter between Mr. Dibble and his wife, was Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, who looked on with a grave air of quiet enjoyment. You would hardly have known him from our former description. He was attired in respectable professional style, with just an assumption of swellishness. His face was cleanly shaven, and he wore a low-crowned hat, and a black wig. From a light, fair man, he had made himself up dark. To a stranger he wore the marks of foreign travel; his cheeks were “bronzed with the Eastern sun.” The disguise was complete, and it certainly made the fellow infinitely better looking than he was in his customary habit, and far more attractive to the “feminine” mind than in either of his former disguises. He had come down to Severntown partly out of curiosity, partly on speculation, with a personal desire to ferret out poor Dibble’s “little game,” and also to run through Avonworth valley, and take a peep at the neighbourhood of Barton Hall. His recent advertising scheme had supplied him with a little ready cash, and he had augmented this at écarté in a recently-established gambling-house, where he was unknown. In funds, and anxious to make up a sufficient sum to enable him to set up as a gentleman on the Continent, he had waited upon Mr. Richard Tallant under an assumed name, and that gentleman had denied all knowledge of him to his face. He would have no more dealings with his police-hunted friend, and they had parted in anger, Richard Tallant threatening to hand his former companion over to the police as an impostor, and Mr. Gibbs making a vow as he left the high steps of the fine West End house, to be revenged on “this mushroom upstart.”