He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I stood.

He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as "Mr.
Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a quaint-looking key in his hand.

Our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.

I mean to give up such nonsense and mind my own business .-- Hark! What the deuse is that odd noise in his chamber?
-- I think I am a little superstitious.

There were two things, when I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.