An observer of the precinct which has been named as an instance in point might have stood under a lamp-post and heard simultaneously the peal of the visitor’s bell from the new terrace on the right hand, and the stroke of tools from the musty workshops on the left.  Waggons laden with deals came up on this side, and landaus came down on the other—­the former to lumber heavily through the old-established contractors’ gates, the latter to sweep fashionably into the square.

About twelve o’clock on the day following Lord Mountclere’s exhibition of himself to Christopher in the jeweller’s shop at Melchester, and almost at the identical time when the viscount was seen to come from the office for marriage-licences in the same place, a carriage drove nearly up to the gates of Messrs. Nockett and Co.’s yard.  A gentleman stepped out and looked around.  He was a man whose years would have been pronounced as five-and-forty by the friendly, fifty by the candid, fifty-two or three by the grim.  He was as handsome a study in grey as could be seen in town, there being far more of the raven’s plumage than of the gull’s in the mixture as yet; and he had a glance of that practised sort which can measure people, weigh them, repress them, encourage them to sprout and blossom as a March sun encourages crocuses, ask them questions, give them answers—­in short, a glance that could do as many things as an American cooking-stove or a multum-in-parvo pocket-knife.  But, as with most men of the world, this was mere mechanism:  his actual emotions were kept so far within his person that they were rarely heard or seen near his features.

On reading the builders’ names over the gateway he entered the yard, and asked at the office if Solomon Chickerel was engaged on the premises.  The clerk was going to be very attentive, but finding the visitor had come only to speak to a workman, his tense attitude slackened a little, and he merely signified the foot of a Flemish ladder on the other side of the yard, saying, ‘You will find him, sir, up there in the joiner’s shop.’

When the man in the black coat reached the top he found himself at the end of a long apartment as large as a chapel and as low as a malt-room, across which ran parallel carpenters’ benches to the number of twenty or more, a gangway being left at the side for access throughout.  Behind every bench there stood a man or two, planing, fitting, or chiselling, as the case might be.  The visitor paused for a moment, as if waiting for some cessation of their violent motions and uproar till he could make his errand known.  He waited ten seconds, he waited twenty; but, beyond that a quick look had been thrown upon him by every pair of eyes, the muscular performances were in no way interrupted:  every one seemed oblivious of his presence, and absolutely regardless of his wish.  In truth, the texture of that salmon-coloured skin could be seen to be aristocratic without a microscope, and the exceptious artizan has an offhand way when contrasts are made painfully strong by an idler of this kind coming, gloved and brushed, into the very den where he is sweating and muddling in his shirt-sleeves.