These were Mr. Wardle, Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, and Mr. Benjamin Allen, whom he had no difficulty in recognising by their voices.
"Very lucky I had the presence of mind to avoid them," thought Mr. Snodgrass with a smile, and walking on tiptoe to another door near the bedside; "this opens into the same passage, and I can walk, quietly and comfortably, away."
There was only one obstacle to his walking quietly and comfortably away, which was that the door was locked and the key gone.
"Let us have some of your best wine to-day, waiter," said old Wardle, rubbing his hands.
"You shall have some of the very best, sir," replied the waiter.
"Let the ladies know we have come in."
"Yes, sir."
Devoutly and ardently did Mr. Snodgrass wish that the ladies could know he had come in. He ventured once to whisper "Waiter!" through the keyhole, but as the probability of the wrong waiter coming to his relief, flashed upon his mind, together with a sense of the strong resemblance between his own situation and that in which another gentleman had been recently found in a neighbouring hotel (an account of whose misfortunes had appeared under the head of "Police" in that morning's paper), he sat himself on a portmanteau, and trembled violently.
"We won't wait a minute for Perker," said Wardle, looking at his watch; "he is always exact. He will be here, in time, if he means to come; and if he does not, it's of no use waiting. Ha! Arabella!"
"My sister!" exclaimed Mr. Benjamin Allen, folding her in a most romantic embrace.
"Oh, Ben, dear, how you do smell of tobacco," said Arabella, rather overcome by this mark of affection.
"Do I?" said Mr. Benjamin Allen, "Do I, Bella? Well, perhaps I do."
