‘Here’s a conspiracy with a vengeance!’ muttered Toole, ‘if a body could only make head or tail of it. Widow!— Eh!— We’ll see: why, she’s like no woman ever I saw. Mrs. Nutter, forsooth!’ and he could not forbear laughing at the conceit. ‘Poor Charles! ’tis ridiculous — though upon my life, I don’t like it. It’s just possible it may be all as true as gospel — they’re the most devilish looking pair I’ve seen out of the dock — curse them — for many a day. I would not wonder if they were robbers. The widow looks consumedly like a man in petticoats — hey!— devilish like. I think I’ll send Moran and Brien up to sleep to-night in the house. But, hang it! if they were, they would not come out in the daytime to give an alarm. Hollo! Moggy, throw me out one of them papers till I see what it’s about.’

So he conned over the notice which provoked him, for he could not half understand it, and he was very curious.

‘Well, keep it safe, Moggy,’ said he. ‘H’m — it does look like law business, after all, and I believe it is. No — they’re not housebreakers, but robbers of another stamp — and a worse, I’ll take my davy.’

‘See,’ said he, as a thought struck him, ‘throw me down both of them papers again — there’s a good girl. They ought to be looked after, I dare say, and I’ll see the poor master’s attorney today, d’ye mind? and we’ll put our heads together — and, that’s right — relict indeed!’

And, with a solemn injunction to keep doors locked and windows fast, and a nod and a wave of his hand to Mistress Moggy, and muttering half a sentence or an oath to himself, and wearying his imagination in search of a clue to this new perplexity, he buttoned his pocket over the legal documents, and strutted down to the village, where his nag awaited him saddled, and Jimmey walking him up and down before the doctor’s hall-door.

Toole was bound upon a melancholy mission that morning. But though properly a minister of life, a doctor is also conversant with death, and inured to the sight of familiar faces in that remarkable disguise. So he spurred away with more coolness, though not less regret than another man, to throw what light he could upon the subject of the inquest which was to sit upon the body of poor Charles Nutter.

The little doctor, on his way to Ringsend, without the necessity of diverging to the right or left, drew bridle at the door of Mr. Luke Gamble, on the Blind Quay, attorney to the late Charles Nutter, and jumping to the ground, delivered a rattling summons thereupon.

It was a dusty, dreary, wainscoted old house — indeed, two old houses intermarried — with doors broken through the partition walls — the floors not all of a level — joined by steps up and down — and having three great staircases, that made it confusing. Through the windows it was not easy to see, such a fantastic mapping of thick dust and dirt coated the glass.

Luke Gamble, like the house, had seen better days. It was not his fault; but an absconding partner had well nigh been his ruin: and, though he paid their liabilities, it was with a strain, and left him a poor man, shattered his connexion, and made the house too large by a great deal for his business.

Doctor Toole came into the clerk’s room, and was ushered by one of these gentlemen through an empty chamber into the attorney’s sanctum. Up two steps stumbled the physician, cursing the house for a place where a gentleman was so much more likely to break his neck than his fast, and found old Gamble in his velvet cap and dressing-gown, in conference with a hard-faced, pale, and pock-marked elderly man, squinting unpleasantly under a black wig, who was narrating something slowly, and with effort, like a man whose memory is labouring to give up its dead, while the attorney, with his spectacles on his nose, was making notes. The speaker ceased abruptly, and turned his pallid visage and jealous, oblique eyes on the intruder.

Luke Gamble looked embarrassed, and shot one devilish angry glance at his clerk, and then made Doctor Toole very welcome.

When Toole had ended his narrative, and the attorney read the notices through, Mr. Gamble’s countenance brightened, and darkened and brightened again, and with a very significant look, he said to the pale, unpleasant face, pitted with small-pox —

‘M. M.,’ and nodded.

His companion extended his hand toward the papers.

‘Never mind,’ said the attorney; ‘there’s that here will fix M. M. in a mighty tight vice.’

‘And who’s M. M., pray?’ enquired Toole.

‘When were these notices served, doctor?’ asked Mr. Gamble.

‘Not an hour ago; but, I say, who the plague’s M. M.?’ answered Toole.

‘M. M.,’ repeated the attorney, smiling grimly on the backs of the notices which lay on the table; ‘why there’s many queer things to be heard of M. M.; and the town, and the country, too, for that matter, is like to know a good deal more of her before long; and who served them — a process-server, or who?’

‘Why, a fat, broad, bull-necked rascal, with a double chin, and a great round f............