now there was no chance of ever seeing her come into one again.

I went from Paris to one of the smaller hotels in Venice. The missis
thought I'd do well to pick up a bit of Italian, and perhaps she fancied
Venice for herself. That's one of the advantages of our profession. You
can go about. It was a second-rate sort of place, and one evening, just
before lighting-up time, I had the salle-a-manger all to myself, and had
just taken up a paper when I hears the door open, and I turns round.

I saw "her" coming down the room. There was no mistaking her. She
wasn't that sort.

I sat with my eyes coming out of my head till she was close to me, and
then I says:

"Carrots!" I says, in a whisper like. That was the name that come to me.

"'Carrots' it is," she says, and down she sits just opposite to me, and
then she laughs.

I could not speak, I could not move, I was that took aback, and the more
frightened I looked the more she laughed till "Kipper" comes into the
room. There was nothing ghostly about him. I never see a man look more
as if he had backed the winner.

"Why, it's 'Enery," he says; and he gives me a slap on the back, as
knocks the life into me again.

"I heard you was dead," I says, still staring at her. "I read it in the
paper--'death of the Marchioness of Appleford.'"