Warburton had now to find cheap lodgings for himself, unfurnished rooms in some poor quarter not too far from the shop.

At length, in a new little street of very red brick, not far from Fulham Palace Road at the Hammersmith end, he came upon a small house which exhibited in its parlour window a card inscribed:  “Two unfurnished rooms to be let to single gentlemen only.”  The precision of this notice made him hopeful, and a certain cleanliness of aspect in the woman who opened to him was an added encouragement; but he found negotiations not altogether easy.  The landlady, a middle-aged widow, seemed to regard him with some peculiar suspicion; before even admitting him to the house, she questioned him closely as to his business, his present place of abode, and so on, and Warburton was all but turning away in impatience, when at last she drew aside, and cautiously invited him to enter.  Further acquaintance with Mrs. Wick led him to understand that the cold, misgiving in her eye, the sour rigidity of her lips, and her generally repellant manner, were characteristics which meant nothing in particular—­save as they resulted from a more or less hard life amid London’s crowd; at present, the woman annoyed him, and only the clean freshness of her vacant rooms induced him to take the trouble of coming to terms with her.

“There’s one thing I must say to you quite plain, to begin with,” remarked Mrs. Wick, whose language, though not disrespectful, had a certain bluntness.  “I can’t admit female visitors—­not on any excuse.”

Speaking thus, she set her face at its rigidest and sourest, and stared past Warburton at the wall.  He, unable to repress a smile, declared his perfect readiness to accept this condition of tenancy.

“Another thing,” pursued the landlady, “is that I don’t like late hours.”  And she eyed him as one might a person caught in flagrant crapulence at one o’clock a.m.

“Why, neither do I,” Will replied.  “But for all that, I may be obliged to come home late now and then.”

“From the theatre, I suppose?”

“I very seldom go to the theatre.” (Mrs. Wick looked sanguine for an instant, but at once relapsed into darker suspicion than ever.) “But as to my hour of returning home, I must have entire liberty.”

The woman meditated, profound gloom on her brows.

“You haven’t told me,” she resumed, shooting a glance of keen distrust, “exactly what your business may be.”

“I am in the sugar line,” responded Will.

“Sugar?  You wouldn’t mind giving me the name of your employers?”

The word so rasped on Warburton’s sensitive temper that he seemed about to speak angrily.  This the woman observed, and added at once: 

“I don’t doubt but that you’re quite respectable, sir, but you can understand as I have to be careful who I take into my house.”

“I understand that, but I must ask you to be satisfied with a reference to my present landlord.  That, and a month’s payment in advance, ought to suffice.”