‘I’m not going to stay at all,’ faltered Nell. ‘I want a few things out of that room, and then — I — I — won’t come down here any more.’

‘And a very nice little room it is!’ said the dwarf looking into it as the child entered. ‘Quite a bower. You’re sure you’re not going to use it, you’re sure you’re not coming back, Nelly?’

‘No,’ replied the child, hurrying away, with the few articles of dress she had come to remove; ‘never again, never again.’

‘She’s very sensitive,’ said Quilp, looking after her. ‘Very sensitive; that’s a pity. The bedstead is much about my size. I think I shall make it my little room.’

Mr Brass encouraging this idea, as he would have encouraged any other emanation from the same source, the dwarf walked in to try the effect, which he did by throwing himself on his back upon the bed with his pipe in his mouth, and then kicking up his legs and smoking violently. Mr Brass applauding this picture very much, and the bed being soft and comfortable, Mr Quilp determined to use it, both as a sleeping place by night and as a kind of divan by day, and in order that it might be converted to the latter purpose at once, remained where he was and smoked his pipe out. The legal gentleman being by this time rather giddy and perplexed in his ideas (for this was one of the operations of the tobacco upon his nervous system), took the opportunity of slinking away into the open air where in course of time he recovered sufficiently to return with a countenance of tolerable composure. He was soon led on by the malicious dwarf to smoke himself into a relapse, and in that state stumbled upon a settee where he slept till morning.

Such were Mr Quilp’s first proceedings on entering upon his new property. He was for some days restrained by business from performing any particular pranks, as his time was pretty well occupied between taking, with the assistance of Mr Brass, a minute inventory of all the goods in the place, and going abroad upon his other concerns which happily engaged him for several hours at a time. His avarice and caution being now thoroughly awakened, however, he was never absent from the house one night, and his eagerness for some termination, good or bad, to the old man’s disorder, increasing rapidly as the time passed by, soon began to vent itself in open murmurs and exclamations of impatience.

Nell shrank timidly from all the dwarf’s advances towards conversation and fled from the very sound of his voice, nor were the lawyer’s smiles less terrible to her than Quilp’s grimaces. She lived in such continual dread and apprehension of meeting one or other of them upon the stairs or in the passages if she stirred from her grandfather’s chamber, that she seldom left it for a moment until late at night, when the silence encouraged her to venture forth and breathe the purer air of some empty room.

One night she had stolen to her usual window and was sitting there very sorrowfully, for the old man had been worse that day, when she thought she heard her name pronounced by a voice in the street, and looking down, recognised Kit, whose endeavours to attract her attention had roused her from her sad reflections.

‘Miss Nell!’ said the boy in a low voice.

‘Yes,’ replied the child, doubtful whether she ought to hold any communication with the supposed culprit, but inclining to her old favourite still, ‘what do you want?’

‘I have wanted to say a word to you for a long time,’ the boy replied, ‘but the people below have driven me away and wouldn’t let me see you. You don’t believe — I hope you don’t really believe — that I deserve to be cast off as I have been; do you, Miss?’

‘I must believe it,’ returned the child. ‘Or why would grandfather have been so angry with you?’