“That night a child might understand

The de’il had business on his hand.”

I ENDED my last chapter with mention of a metaphoric storm; but a literal storm broke over the city of London on that night, such as its denizens remembered for many a day after. The lightning seemed, for more than an hour, the continuous pulsations of light from a sulphurous furnace, and the thunder pealed with the cracks and rattlings of one long roar of artillery. The children, waked by the din, cried in their beds in terror, and Sarah Rumble got her dress about her, and said her prayers in panic.

After a while the intervals between the awful explosions were a little more marked, and Miss Rumble’s voice could be heard by the children, comforting and reassuring in the brief lulls; although had they known what a fright their comforter was herself in, their confidence in her would have been impaired.

Perhaps there was a misgiving in Sarah Rumble’s mind that the lightnings and thunders of irate heaven were invoked by the presence of her mysterious lodger. Was even she herself guiltless, in hiding under her roof-tree that impious old sinner, whom Rosemary Court disgorged at dead of night, as the churchyard does a ghost — about whose past history — whose doings and whose plans, except that they were wicked — she knew no more than about those of an evil spirit, had she chanced, in one of her spectre-seeing moods, to spy one moving across the lobby.

His talk was so cold and wicked; his temper so fiendish; his nocturnal disguises and outgoings so obviously pointed to secret guilt; and his relations with the meek Mr. Larkin, and with those potent Jews, who, grumbling and sullen, yet submitted to his caprices, as genii to those of the magician who has the secret of command — that Mr. Dingwell had in her eyes something of a supernatural horror surrounding him. In the thunderstorm, Sarah Rumble vowed secretly to reconsider the religious propriety of harbouring this old man; and amid these qualms, it was with something of fear and anger that, in a silence between the peals of the now subsiding storm, she heard the creak of his shoe upon the stair.

That even on such a night, with the voice of divine anger in the air, about his ears, he could not forego his sinister excursion, and for once at these hours remain decorously in his rooms! Her wrath overcame her fear of him. She would not have her house burnt and demolished over her head, with thunderbolts, for his doings.

She went forth, with her candle in her hand, and stood at the turn of the banister, confronting Mr. Dingwell, who, also furnished with a candle, was now about midway down the last flight of stairs.

“Egeria, in the thunder!” exclaimed the hard, scoffing tones of Mr. Dingwell; whom, notwithstanding her former encounter with him, she would hardly have recognised in his ugly disguise.

“A hoffle night for anyone to go out, sir,” she said, rather sternly, with a courtesy at the same time.

“Hoffle, is it?” said Mr. Dingwell, amused, with mock gravity.

“The hofflest, sir, I think I hever ‘ave remembered.”

“Why, ma’am, it isn’t raining; I put my hand out of the window. There’s none of that hoffle rain, ma’am, that gives a fellow rheumatism. I hope there’s no unusual fog — is there?”

“There, sir;” exclaimed she, as another loud peal rattled over Rosemary Court, with a blue glare through the lobby window and the fanlight in the hall. She paused, and lifted her hand to her eyes till it subsided, and then murmured an ejaculation.

“I like thunder, my dear. It reminds me of your name, dear Miss Rumble;” and he prolonged the name with a rolling pronunciation. “Shakespeare, you know, who says everything better than anyone else in the world, makes that remarkable old gentleman, King Lear, say, ‘Thunder, rumble thy bellyfull!’ Of course, I would not say that in a drawing-room, or to you; but kings are so refined they may say things we can’t, and a genius like Shakespeare hits it off.”

“I would not go out, sir, on such a night, without I was very sure it was about something good I was a-going,” said Miss Rumble, very pale.

“You labour under electro-phobia, my dear ma’am, and mistake it for pie............