had got from my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it. You remember whether I took him out or not. I say nothing against the man; he may be a very good fellow, for anything I know; I hope he is.”

“Was he offended by what you said?”

“No, he took it pretty well; he was civil enough. Where are you, Loo?” He sat up in bed and kissed her. “Good night, my dear, good night.”

“You have nothing more to tell me?”

“No. What should I have? You wouldn’t have me tell you a lie?”

“I wouldn’t have you do that tonight, Tom, of all the nights in your life; many and much happier as I hope they will be.”

“Thank you, my dear Loo. I am so tired that I am sure I wonder I don’t say anything to get to sleep. Go to bed, go to bed.”

Kissing her again, he turned round, drew the coverlet over his head, and lay as still as if that time had come by which she had adjured him. She stood for some time at the bed-side before she slowly moved away. She stopped at the door, looked back when she had opened it, and asked him if he had called her? But he lay still, and she softly closed the door and returned to her room.

Then the wretched boy looked cautiously up and found her gone, crept out of bed, fastened his door, and threw himself upon his pillow again—tearing his hair, morosely crying, grudgingly loving her, hatefully but impenitently spurning himself, and no less hatefully and unprofitably spurning all the good in the world.

CHAPTER IX

Hearing the Last of It

MRS. SPARSIT, lying by to recover the tone of her nerves in Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, kept such a sharp look-out, night and day, under her Coriolanian eyebrows, that her eyes, like a couple of lighthouses on an iron-bound coast, might have warned all prudent mariners from that bold rock her Roman nose and the dark and craggy region in its neighbourhood, but for the placidity of her manner. Although it was hard to believe that her retiring for the night could be anything but a form, so severely wide awake were those classical eyes of hers, and so impossible did it seem that her rigid nose could yield to any relaxing influence, yet her manner of sitting, smoothing her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton stirrup, was so perfectly serene that most observers would have been constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature in the earthly tabernacle of a bird of the hookbeaked order.

She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.

She took very kindly to Mr. Harthouse, and had some pleasant conversation with him soon after her arrival. She made him her stately curtsey in the garden, one morning before breakfast.

“It appears but yesterday, sir,” said Mrs. Sparsit, “that I had the honour of receiving you at the Bank, when you were so good as to wish to be made acquainted with Mr. Bounderby’s address.”

“An occasion, I am sure, not to be forgotten by myself in the course of Ages,” said Mr. Harthouse, inclining his head to Mrs. Sparsit with the most indolent of all possible airs.

“We live in a singular world, sir,” said Mrs. Sparsit.

“I have had the honour, by a coincidence of which I am proud, to have made a remark, similar in effect, though not so epigrammatically expressed.”

“A singular world, I would say, sir,” pursued Mrs. Sparsit, after acknowledging the compliment with a drooping of her dark eyebrows, not altogether so mild in its expression as her voice was in its dulcet tones, “as regards the intimacies we form at one time with individuals we were