By -- --, a violent temper, what a thing it is; always raising a dust, and kicking up a row, just when it's least wanted." The voice made Charles start.
"Great God!" he said, "it's not--" "Yes, it is," was the reply; "and when you have taken a seat on the farther end of that bench, and recovered your temper, I'll show, and not before." Charles walked to the bench and sat down.
"You can come out," he said, in a carefully lowered voice, in which there was contempt as well as anger.
Accordingly there was a little more crackling among the fagots, and a slight, shabbily dressed man came to the door and peered warily out, shading his blinking eyes with his hand.
"If there is a thing I hate," he said, with a curious mixture of recklessness and anxiety, "it is a noise.

Sit so that you face the left, will you, and I'll look after the right, and if you see any one coming you may as well mention it.

I am only at home to old friends." He took his hand from his eyes as they became more accustomed to the light, and showed a shrewd, dissipated face, that yet had a kind of ruined good looks about it, and, what was more hateful to Charles than anything else, a decided resemblance to Ruth.

Though he was shabby in the extreme, his clothes sat upon him as they always and only do sit upon a gentleman; and, though his face and voice showed that he had severed himself effectually from the class in which he had been born, a certain unsuitability remained between his appearance and his evidently disreputable circumstances.

When Charles looked at him he was somehow reminded of a broken-down thorough-bred in a hansom cab.
"It is a quiet spot," remarked Raymond Deyncourt, for he it was, standing in the door-way, his watchful eyes scanning the deserted court-yard and strip of green.