“My dear,” returned the cherub, looking at them both, “you broke so much in the first — Gush, if I may so express myself — that I think I am equal to a good large breakage now.”

“Mr. Wilfer,” said John Rokesmith, excitedly and joyfully, “Bella takes me, though I have no fortune, even no present occupation; nothing but what I can get in the life before us. Bella takes me!”

“Yes, I should rather have inferred, my dear sir,” returned the cherub feebly, “that Bella took you, from what I have within these few minutes remarked.”

“You don’t know, Pa,” said Bella, “how ill I have used him!”

“You don’t know, sir,” said Rokesmith, “what a heart she has!”

“You don’t know, Pa,” said Bella, “what a shocking creature I was growing, when he saved me from myself!”

“You don’t know, sir,” said Rokesmith, “what a sacrifice she has made for me!”

“My dear Bella,” replied the cherub, still pathetically scared, “and my dear John Rokesmith, if you will allow me so to call you—”

“Yes do, Pa, do!” urged Bella. “I allow you, and my will is his law. Isn’t it — dear John Rokesmith?”

There was an engaging shyness in Bella, coupled with an engaging tenderness of love and confidence and pride, in thus first calling him by name, which made it quite excusable in John Rokesmith to do what he did. What he did was, once more to give her the appearance of vanishing as aforesaid.

“I think, my dears,” observed the cherub, “that if you could make it convenient to sit one on one side of me, and the other on the other, we should get on rather more consecutively, and make things rather plainer. John Rokesmith mentioned, a while ago, that he had no present occupation.”

“None,” said Rokesmith.

“No, Pa, none,” said Bella.

“From which I argue,” proceeded the cherub, “that he has left Mr. Boffin?”

“Yes, Pa. And so—”

“Stop a bit, my dear. I wish to lead up to it by degrees. And that Mr. Boffin has not treated him well?”

“Has treated him most shamefully, dear Pa!” cried Bella with a flashing face.

“Of which,” pursued the cherub, enjoining patience with his hand, “a certain mercenary young person distantly related to myself, could not approve? Am I leading up to it right?”

“Could not approve, sweet Pa,” said Bella, with a tearful laugh and a joyful kiss.

“Upon which,” pursued the cherub, “the certain mercenary young person distantly related to myself, having previously observed and mentioned to myself that prosperity was spoiling Mr. Boffin, felt that she must not sell her sense of what was right and what was wrong, and what was true and what was false, and what was just and what was unjust, for any price that could be paid to her by any one alive? Am I leading up to it right?”

With another tearful laugh Bella joyfully kissed him again.

“And therefore — and therefore,” the cherub went on in a glowing voice, as Bella’s hand stole gradually up his waistcoat to his neck, “this mercenary young person distantly related to myself, refused the price,