Nor did this mood promise amendment even up to that night, when a rap having come to the door, Geordie started, while guidwife Christian went undismayed to open the same; for, moody as she was, she was not affected by evening raps as he was, and had been since that eventful midnight. But if the sturdy blacksmith was afraid before she obeyed the call, he was greatly more so after she had opened the door, and when she led into the parlour an old man, with hair more than usually grey even for his years, with a staff in his hand, bearing up, as he came in, a tall, wasted body--so wasted, that he might have been supposed to have waited all this time for a leg of that goose which had been so very long at the fire. The grief of years had eaten up his face, and only left untouched the corrugations itself had made. Yet withal he was a gentleman; for his bow to Geordie was just that which the grandees of the Wynd made to each other as they passed and repassed. No sooner was he seated, holding his cane between his shrivelled legs, and his sharp grey eye fixed on the blacksmith, than the latter became as one enchanted for a second time, with all the horrors of the first catalepsy upon him, by the process of the double sense insisted for by Abercromby, but thus known in Bell's Wynd before his day. Yes, Geordie was entranced again, nor less guidwife Christian--both staring at the stranger, as if their minds had gone back through long bygone years to catch the features of a prototype for comparison with that long, withered face, so yellow and grave-like; then Christian looked stealthily, and concealed her face. "You are a blacksmith, Mr. Gourlay?" "Yes, sir." "How long have you been here in Bell's Wynd?" "Nine years, come Beltane Feast." "Not so much as the half of twenty," said the stranger, more inwards than outwards. "Twenty!" ejaculated Christian, as if she could not just help herself. And Geordie searched her rigid face for a stray sympathy, repeating within the teeth that very same word--"Twenty." "Then," continued the old man, "you cannot tell who occupied the flat below at that long period back?" "No." "And who occupies it now?" Geordie was as dumb as the white figure, or as the head on the pillow with the rat-brown mutch; and this time Christian answered for him: "It hasna been occupied for twenty years, sir; and it has been shut up a' that lang time." "Twenty years!" ejaculated the old man, pondering deeply, and sighing heavily and painfully. "Do any of you know Mr. Thomas Dallas, the Clerk to the Signet, who lived once in Lady Stair's Close?" "Dead eighteen years since," replied the wife. "Ah, I see," rejoined the stranger; "and so the house has been thus long closed!" Then musingly, "But then it will be empty--no furniture, nothing but bare walls." "Naebody kens," replied George, still busy examining the face of the questioner, as if he could not get it to be steady alongside the image in his own mind.