“Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield,” he replied, with a dry grin, “I mean, just at present, what I say.”

“And what do you mean by your look?” I retorted, quietly.

“By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that’s sharp practice! What do I mean by my look?”

“Yes,” said I. “By your look.”

He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward—still scraping, very slowly—

“When I was but a numble clerk, she always looked down upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed.”

“Well?” said I; “suppose you were!”

“—And beneath him, too,” pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin.

“Don’t you know the Doctor better,” said I, “than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?”

He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered—

“Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!”

My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor’s happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow’s twisting.

“He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving me about,” said Uriah. “One of your fine gentlemen he was! I was very meek and umble—and I am. But I didn’t like that sort of thing—and I don’t!”

He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the while.

“She is one of your lovely women, she is,” he pursued, when he had slowly restored his face to its natural form; “and ready to be no friend to such as me, I know. She’s just the person as would put my Agnes up to higher sort of game. Now, I ain’t one of your lady’s men, Master Copperfield; but I’ve had eyes in my ed, a pretty long time back. We umble ones have got eyes, mostly speaking—and we look out of ’em.”

I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw in his face, with poor success.

“Now, I’m not a-going to let myself be run down, Copperfield,” he continued, raising that part of his countenance where his red eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph, “and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship. I don’t approve of it. I don’t mind acknowledging to you that I’ve got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all intruders. I ain’t a-going, if I know it, to run the risk of being plotted against.”