 Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immediately withdraws
his eyes from her face, and looks anywhere else.
    »Indeed, it has been made so hard,« he goes on, »to have any idea what that
party was up to in combination with others, that until the loss which we all
deplore, I was gravelled - an expression which your Ladyship, moving in the
higher circles, will be so good as to consider tantamount to knocked over. Small
likewise - a name by which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your
Ladyship is not acquainted with - got to be so close and double-faced that at
times it wasn't easy to keep one's hands off his ed. However, what with the
exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the help of a mutual friend by
the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a high aristocratic turn, and has your
Ladyship's portrait always hanging up in his room), I have now reasons for an
apprehension, as to which I come to put your Ladyship upon your guard. First,
will your Ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any strange visitors
this morning? I don't mean fashionable visitors, but such visitors, for
instance, as Miss Barbary's old servant, or as a person without the use of his
lower extremities, carried up-stairs similarly to a Guy?«
    »No!«
    »Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here, and have
been received here. Because I saw them at the door, and waited at the corner of
the square till they came out, and took half-an-hour's turn afterwards to avoid
them.«
    »What have I to do with that, or what have you? I do not understand you.
What do you mean?«
    »Your Ladyship, I come to put you on your guard. There may be no occasion
for it. Very well. Then I have only done my best to keep my promise to Miss
Summerson. I strongly suspect (from what Small has dropped, and from what we
have corkscrewed out of him) that those letters I was to have brought to your
Ladyship were not destroyed when I supposed they were. That if there was
anything to be blown upon, it is blown upon. That the visitors I have alluded to
have been here this morning to make money of it. And that the money is made, or
making.«
    Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises
