As her mother did not reply Elizabeth-Jane’s mind reverted to the words of the waiter, that the Three Mariners was an inn of moderate charges.  A recommendation good for one person was probably good for another.  “Let’s go where the young man has gone to,” she said.  “He is respectable.  What do you say?”

Her mother assented, and down the street they went.

In the meantime the Mayor’s thoughtfulness, engendered by the note as stated, continued to hold him in abstraction; till, whispering to his neighbour to take his place, he found opportunity to leave the chair.  This was just after the departure of his wife and Elizabeth.

Outside the door of the assembly-room he saw the waiter, and beckoning to him asked who had brought the note which had been handed in a quarter of an hour before.

“A young man, sir—­a sort of traveller.  He was a Scotchman seemingly.”

“Did he say how he had got it?”

“He wrote it himself, sir, as he stood outside the window.”

“Oh—­wrote it himself....Is the young man in the hotel?”

“No, sir.  He went to the Three Mariners, I believe.”

The mayor walked up and down the vestibule of the hotel with his hands under his coat tails, as if he were merely seeking a cooler atmosphere than that of the room he had quitted.  But there could be no doubt that he was in reality still possessed to the full by the new idea, whatever that might be.  At length he went back to the door of the dining-room, paused, and found that the songs, toasts, and conversation were proceeding quite satisfactorily without his presence.  The Corporation, private residents, and major and minor tradesmen had, in fact, gone in for comforting beverages to such an extent that they had quite forgotten, not only the Mayor, but all those vast, political, religious, and social differences which they felt necessary to maintain in the daytime, and which separated them like iron grills.  Seeing this the Mayor took his hat, and when the waiter had helped him on with a thin holland overcoat, went out and stood under the portico.

Very few persons were now in the street; and his eyes, by a sort of attraction, turned and dwelt upon a spot about a hundred yards further down.  It was the house to which the writer of the note had gone—­the Three Mariners—­whose two prominent Elizabethan gables, bow-window, and passage-light could be seen from where he stood.  Having kept his eyes on it for a while he strolled in that direction.

This ancient house of accommodation for man and beast, now, unfortunately, pulled down, was built of mellow sandstone, with mullioned windows of the same material, markedly out of perpendicular from the settlement of foundations.  The bay window projecting into the street, whose interior was so popular among the frequenters of the inn, was closed with shutters, in each of which appeared a heart-shaped aperture, somewhat more attenuated in the right and left ventricles than is seen in Nature.  Inside these illuminated holes, at a distance of about three inches, were ranged at this hour, as every passer knew, the ruddy polls of Billy Wills the glazier, Smart the shoemaker, Buzzford the general dealer, and others of a secondary set of worthies, of a grade somewhat below that of the diners at the King’s Arms, each with his yard of clay.