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Rh voice, “See! take your rent for one half year. It is upon the table; there, take it away, for it fell due the week before.”

“I shall not receive it to-day for all that,” replied the old master, with a firmly recovered and determined tone of voice, “but I both will and must know what it is that so dreadfully agitates you, and by what means you gained access into my fast-locked and bolted dwelling!”

“What I moan, and what I sigh for,” half sobbed and laughed the offended lodger, “Eh! surely the spirits that haunt the gallows have a right to do that; and why not he who regularly and orderly pays for his own lodging? How did I gain access here, you say?—Eh! what kind of questions are these?—why, the house door was standing wide open when I came; upon my honour, I can assure you, nevertheless, that I remarked nothing else.”

“For all that,” said master Rhenfried, “I have earnestly to entreat of you to leave these lodgings to-morrow morning, for truly I am not accustomed to live with people whose doors fly off their hinges when they just approach them; I will never live with them any more.”

“But I do not happen to be of the same opinion,” said the strange lodger, in a contemptuous tone, “I laugh at the idea of going out; you know you are bound over to the former landlord to suffer