‘Mind you don’t break out again, you villain,’ said Quilp, looking sternly at him, ‘or I’ll make faces at you and throw you into fits, I will. Now you Sir, why haven’t you been to me as you promised?’

‘What should I come for?’ retorted Kit. ‘I hadn’t any business with you, no more than you had with me.’

‘Here, mistress,’ said Quilp, turning quickly away, and appealing from Kit to his mother. ‘When did his old master come or send here last? Is he here now? If not, where’s he gone?’

‘He has not been here at all,’ she replied. ‘I wish we knew where they have gone, for it would make my son a good deal easier in his mind, and me too. If you’re the gentleman named Mr Quilp, I should have thought you’d have known, and so I told him only this very day.’

‘Humph!’ muttered Quilp, evidently disappointed to believe that this was true. ‘That’s what you tell this gentleman too, is it?’

‘If the gentleman comes to ask the same question, I can’t tell him anything else, Sir; and I only wish I could, for our own sakes,’ was the reply.

Quilp glanced at Richard Swiveller, and observed that having met him on the threshold, he assumed that he had come in search of some intelligence of the fugitives. He supposed he was right?

‘Yes,’ said Dick, ‘that was the object of the present expedition. I fancied it possible—but let us go ring fancy’s knell. I’ll begin it.’

‘You seem disappointed,’ observed Quilp.

‘A baffler, Sir, a baffler, that’s all,’ returned Dick. ‘I have entered upon a speculation which has proved a baffler; and a Being of brightness and beauty will be offered up a sacrifice at Cheggs’s altar. That’s all, Sir.’

The dwarf eyed Richard with a sarcastic smile, but Richard, who had been taking a rather strong lunch with a friend, observed him not, and continued to deplore his fate with mournful and despondent looks. Quilp plainly discerned that there was some secret reason for this visit and his uncommon disappointment, and, in the hope that there might be means of mischief lurking beneath it, resolved to worm it out. He had no sooner adopted this resolution, than he conveyed as much honesty into his face as it was capable of expressing, and sympathised with Mr Swiveller exceedingly.

‘I am disappointed myself,’ said Quilp, ‘out of mere friendly feeling for them; but you have real reasons, private reasons I have no doubt, for your disappointment, and therefore it comes heavier than mine.’

‘Why, of course it does,’ Dick observed, testily.

‘Upon my word, I’m very sorry, very sorry. I’m rather cast down myself. As we are companions in adversity, shall we be companions in the surest way of forgetting it? If you had no particular business, now, to lead you in another direction,’ urged Quilp, plucking him by the sleeve and looking slyly up into his face out of the corners of his eyes, ‘there is a house by the water-side where they have some of the noblest Schiedam—reputed to be smuggled, but that’s between ourselves—that can be got in all the world. The landlord knows me. There’s a little summerhouse overlooking the river, where we might take a glass of this delicious liquor with a whiff of the best tobacco—it’s in this case, and of the rarest quality, to my certain knowledge—and be perfectly snug and happy, could we possibly contrive it; or is there any very particular engagement that peremptorily takes you another way, Mr Swiveller, eh?’

As the dwarf spoke, Dick’s face relaxed into a compliant smile, and his brows slowly unbent. By the time he had finished, Dick was looking down at Quilp in the same sly manner as Quilp was looking up at him, and there remained nothing more to be done but to set out for the house in question. This they