No use; not a sign of a letter; and the time was getting on--oh, Lord! how the time did get on in Mr.
Davager's room that morning.
I jumped down from the bed, so desperate at my ill luck that I hardly cared whether anybody heard me or not.

Quite a little cloud of dust rose at my feet as they thumped on the carpet.
"Hullo!" thought I, "my friend the head chambermaid takes it easy here.
Nice state for a carpet to be in, in one of the best bedrooms at the Gatliffe Arms." Carpet! I had been jumping up on the bed, and staring up at the walls, but I had never so much as given a glance down at the carpet.

Think of me pretending to be a lawyer, and not knowing how to look low enough! The carpet! It had been a stout article in its time, had evidently began in a drawing-room; then descended to a coffee-room; then gone upstairs altogether to a bedroom.

The ground was brown, and the pattern was bunches of leaves and roses speckled over the ground at regular distances.

I reckoned up the bunches.