The Macnamaras have been mighty kind.

But when the news was told her this morning, poor thing, she would not stay, and went home; and there she is, poor little soul, breaking her heart.' Mr.Gamble was not ceremonious; so he just threw a cursory and anxious glance round the room, clapped his hands on his coat pockets, making a bunch of keys ring somewhere deep in their caverns.

And all being right-- 'Come along, gentlemen,' says he, 'I'm going to lock the door;' and without looking behind him, he bolted forth abstractedly into his dusty ante-room.
'Get your cloak about you, Sir--remember your _cough_, you know--the air of the streets is sharp,' said he with a sly wink, to his ugly client, who hastily took the hint.
'Is that _coach_ at the door ?' bawled Gamble to his clerks in the next room, while he locked the door of his own snuggery behind him; and being satisfied it was so, he conducted the party out by a side door, avoiding the clerks' room, and so down stairs.
'Drive to the courts,' said the attorney to the coachman; and that was all Toole learned about it that day.

So he mounted his nag, and resumed his journey to Ringsend at a brisk trot.
I suppose, when he turned the key in his door, and dropped it into his breeches' pocket, the gentleman attorney assumed that he had made everything perfectly safe in his private chamber, though Toole thought he had not looked quite the same again after that sudden change of countenance he had remarked.
Now, it was a darksome day, and the windows of Mr.Gamble's room were so obscured with cobwebs, dust, and dirt, that even on a sunny day they boasted no more than a dim religious light.

But on this day a cheerful man would have asked for a pair of candles, to dissipate the twilight and sustain his spirits.
He had not been gone, and the room empty ten minutes, when the door through which he had seemed to look on that unknown something that dismayed him, opened softly--at first a little--then a little more--then came a knock at it--then it opened more, and the dark shape of Charles Nutter, with rigid features and white eye-balls, glided stealthily and crouching into the chamber, and halted at the table, and seemed to read the endorsements of the notices that lay there..