(or Clifford’s, if his we must consider it) were driven away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shop-bell.

A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepzibah delayed a moment, while muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor in a forty years’ warfare against the east wind. A characteristic sound, however, — neither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and reverberating spasm in somebody’s capacious depth of chest; — impelled her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faint-heartedness so common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling Hepzibah. But the visitor quietly closed the