will be disappointed—particularly Tom Gradgrind, and he can’t know it too soon. In reference to the Bank robbery, there has been a mistake made concerning my mother. If there hadn’t been overofficiousness it wouldn’t have been made, and I hate overofficiousness at all times, whether or no. Good evening!”

Although Mr. Bounderby carried it off in these terms, holding the door open for the company to depart, there was a blustering sheepishness about him, at once extremely crestfallen and superlatively absurd. Detected as the Bully of humility, who had built his windy reputation upon lies, and in his boastfulness had put the honest truth as far away from him as if he had advanced the mean claim (there is no meaner) to tack himself on to a pedigree, he cut a most ridiculous figure. With the people filing off at the door he held, who he knew would carry what had passed to the whole town, to be given to the four winds, he could not have looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn if he had had his ears cropped. Even that unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.

Rachael and Sissy, leaving Mrs. Pegler to occupy a bed at her son’s for that night, walked together to the gate of Stone Lodge and there parted. Mr. Gradgrind joined them before they had gone very far, and spoke with much interest of Stephen Blackpool, for whom he thought this signal failure of the suspicions against Mrs. Pegler was likely to work well.

As to the whelp, throughout this scene, as on all other late occasions, he had stuck close to Bounderby. He seemed to feel that as long as Bounderby could make no discovery without his knowledge, he was so far safe. He never visited his sister, and had only seen her once since she went home—that is to say on the night when he still stuck close to Bounderby, as already related.

There was one dim unformed fear lingering about his sister’s mind, to which she never gave utterance, which surrounded the graceless and ungrateful boy with a dreadful mystery. The same dark possibility had presented itself in the same shapeless guise, this very day, to Sissy, when Rachael spoke of someone who would be confounded by Stephen’s return having put him out of the way. Louisa had never spoken of harbouring any suspicion of her brother in connection with the robbery—she and Sissy had held no confidence on the subject, save in that one interchange of looks when the unconscious father rested his grey head on his hand—but it was understood between them, and they both knew it. This other fear was so awful that it hovered about each of them like a ghostly shadow, neither daring to think of its being near herself, far less of its being near the other.

And still the forced spirit which the whelp had plucked up throve with them. If Stephen Blackpool was not the thief, let him show himself. Why didn’t he?

Another night. Another day and night. No Stephen Blackpool. Where was the man, and why did he not come back?

CHAPTER VI

The Starlight

THE Sunday was a bright Sunday in autumn, clear and cool, when early in the morning Sissy and Rachael met, to walk in the country.

As Coketown cast ashes not only on its own head but on the neighbourhoods, too—after the manner of those pious persons who do penance for their own sins by putting other people into sackcloth—it was customary for those who now and then thirsted for a draught of pure air, which is not absolutely the most wicked among the vanities of life, to get a few miles away by the railroad, and then begin their walk, or their lounge in the fields. Sissy and Rachael helped themselves out of the smoke by the usual means, and were put down at a station about midway between the town and Mr. Bounderby’s retreat.

Though the green landscape was blotted here and there with heaps of coal, it was green elsewhere, and there were trees to see, and there were larks singing (though it was Sunday), and there were pleasant scents in the air, and all was overarched by a bright blue sky. In the distance one way, Coketown showed as a black mist; in another distance hills began to rise; in a third, there was a