‘Come in, sir,’ said Miss Wren, who was working at her bench. ‘And who may you be?’ Mr Sloppy introduced himself by name and buttons. ‘Oh indeed!’ cried Jenny. ‘Ah! I have been looking forward to knowing you. I heard of your distinguishing yourself.’ ‘Did you, Miss?’ grinned Sloppy. ‘I am sure I am glad to hear it, but I don’t know how.’ ‘Pitching somebody into a mud-cart,’ said Miss Wren. ‘Oh! That way!’ cried Sloppy. ‘Yes, Miss.’ And threw back his head and laughed. ‘Bless us!’ exclaimed Miss Wren, with a start. ‘Don’t open your mouth as wide as that, young man, or it’ll catch so, and not shut again some day.’ Mr Sloppy opened it, if possible, wider, and kept it open until his laugh was out.

‘There, young man!’ said the dolls’ dressmaker. ‘Now I hope you feel pretty comfortable?’ Apparently, Mr Fledgeby did not, for he cried by way of answer, ‘Oh—h how I do smart!’ Miss Jenny got his Persian gown upon him, extinguished his eyes crookedly with his Persian cap, and helped him to his bed: upon which he climbed groaning. ‘Business between you and me being out of the question to-day, young man, and my time being precious,’ said Miss Jenny then, ‘I’ll make myself scarce. Are you comfortable now?’ ‘Oh my eye!’ cried Mr Fledgeby. ‘No, I ain’t. Oh—h—h! how I do smart!’ The last thing Miss Jenny saw, as she looked back before closing the room door, was Mr Fledgeby in the act of plunging and gambolling all over his bed, like a porpoise or dolphin in its native element.

He looked full at her handsome face, and in his own handsome face there was a light of blended admiration, anger, and reproach, which she—who loved him so in secret whose heart had long been so full, and he the cause of its overflowing—drooped before. She tried hard to retain her firmness, but he saw it melting away under his eyes. In the moment of its dissolution, and of his first full knowledge of his influence upon her, she dropped, and he caught her on his arm. ‘Lizzie! Rest so a moment. Answer what I ask you. If I had not been what you call removed from you and cut off from you, would you have made this appeal to me to leave you?’ ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Don’t ask me, Mr Wrayburn. Let me go back.’ ‘I swear to you, Lizzie, you shall go directly. I swear to you, you shall go alone. I’ll not accompany you, I’ll not follow you, if you will reply.’ ‘How can I, Mr Wrayburn? How can I tell you what I should have done, if you had not been what you are?’ ‘If I had not been what you make me out to be,’ he struck in, skilfully changing the form of words, ‘would you still have hated me?’ ‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she replied appealingly, and weeping, ‘you know me better than to think I do!’ ‘If I had not been what you make me out to be, Lizzie, would you still have been indifferent to me?’ ‘O Mr Wrayburn,’ she answered as before, ‘you know me better than that too!’ There was something in the attitude of her whole figure as he supported it, and she hung her head, which besought him to be merciful and not force her to disclose her heart. He was not merciful with her, and he made her do it.

‘Wish I may die,’ said Riderhood, smiting his right leg, and laughing, as he sat on the grass, ‘if you ain’t ha’ been a imitating me, T’otherest governor! Never thought myself so good-looking afore!’ Truly, Bradley Headstone had taken careful note of the honest man’s dress in the course of that night-walk they had had together. He must have committed it to memory, and slowly got it by heart. It was exactly reproduced in the dress he now wore. And whereas, in his own schoolmaster clothes, he usually looked as if they were the clothes of some other man, he now looked, in the clothes of some other man or men, as if they were his own.

‘I said,’ was the reply, made with that former gleam of determination, ‘that I would find her out by any means, fair or foul. These are foul, and I’ll take them—if I am not first tempted to break the head of Mr Dolls with the fumigator. Can you get the direction? Do you mean that? Speak! If that’s what you have come for, say how much you want.’ ‘Ten shillings—Threepenn’orths Rum,’ said Mr Dolls. ‘You shall have it.’ ‘Fifteen shillings—Threepenn’orths Rum,’ said Mr Dolls, making an attempt to stiffen himself.

‘You are still sanguine, Hexam.’ ‘Certainly I am, sir. Why, we have everything on our side.’ ‘Except your sister, perhaps,’ thought Bradley. But he only gloomily thought it, and said nothing. ‘Everything on our side,’ repeated the boy with boyish confidence. ‘Respectability, an excellent connexion for me, common sense, everything!’ ‘To be sure, your sister has always shown herself a devoted sister,’ said Bradley, willing to sustain himself on even that low ground of hope. ‘Naturally, Mr Headstone, I have a good deal of influence with her. And now that you have honoured me with your confidence and spoken to me first, I say again, we have everything on our side.’ And Bradley thought again, ‘Except your sister, perhaps.’

The schoolmaster went his way, brooding and brooding, and a sense of being vanquished in a struggle might have been pieced out of his worried face. Truly, in his breast there lingered a resentful shame to find himself defeated by this passion for Charley Hexam’s sister, though in the very self-same moments he was concentrating himself upon the object of bringing the passion to a successful issue. He appeared before the dolls’ dressmaker, sitting alone at her work. ‘Oho!’ thought that sharp young personage, ‘it’s you, is it? I know your tricks and your manners, my friend!’

The respected Mr Lammle was a bully, by nature and by usual practice. Perceiving, as Fledgeby’s affronts cumulated, that conciliation by no means answered the purpose here, he now directed a scowling look into Fledgeby’s small eyes for the effect of the opposite treatment. Satisfied by what he saw there, he burst into a violent passion and struck his hand upon the table, making the china ring and dance.

‘I have been thinking,’ Jenny went on, ‘as I sat at work to-day, what a thing it would be, if I should be able to have your company till I am married, or at least courted. Because when I am courted, I shall make Him do some of the things that you do for me. He couldn’t brush my hair like you do, or help me up and down stairs like you do, and he couldn’t do anything like you do; but he could take my work home, and he could call for orders in his clumsy way. And he shall too. I’ll trot him about, I can tell him!’ Jenny Wren had her personal vanities—happily for her—and no intentions were stronger in her breast than the various trials and torments that were, in the fulness of time, to be inflicted upon ‘him.’ ‘Wherever he may happen to be just at present, or whoever he may happen to be,’ said Miss Wren, ‘I know his tricks and his manners, and I give him warning to look out.’ ‘Don’t you think you are rather hard upon him?’ asked her friend, smiling, and smoothing her hair. ‘Not a bit,’ replied the sage Miss Wren, with an air of vast experience. ‘My dear, they don’t care for you, those fellows, if you’re not hard upon ‘em. But I was saying If I should be able to have your company. Ah! What a large If! Ain’t it?’

Many disordered papers were before him, and he looked at them about as hopefully as an innocent civilian might look at a crowd of troops

In its own despite, in a constant conflict with itself and them, it had done so. And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never.

The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger

He spoke in a dropped voice, and with more than one glance at Lizzie who had pulled on her hood again. Both men then looked with a weird unholy interest in the wake of Gaffer’s boat. ‘Easy does it, betwixt us. Shall I take him aboard, pardner?’ ‘No,’ said the other. In so surly a tone that the man, after a blank stare, acknowledged it with the retort: ‘—Arn’t been eating nothing as has disagreed with you, have you, pardner?’ ‘Why, yes, I have,’ said Gaffer. ‘I have been swallowing too much of that word, Pardner. I am no pardner of yours.’ ‘Since when was you no pardner of mine, Gaffer Hexam Esquire?’ ‘Since you was accused of robbing a man. Accused of robbing a live man!’ said Gaffer, with great indignation.