crying my eyes out of my head, and Ma will he sure to ask me what’s the matter. Oh, take me down, somebody, please, please, please!”
Mr. Boffin took her down, and saw her driven away, with her poor little red eyes and weak chin peering over the great apron of the custard-coloured phaeton, as if she had been ordered to expiate some childish misdemeanor by going to bed in the daylight, and were peeping over the counterpane in a miserable flutter of repentance and low spirits. Returning to the breakfast-room, he found Mrs. Lammle still standing on her side of the table, and Mr. Lammle on his.
“I’ll take care,” said Mr. Boffin, showing the money and the necklace, “that these are soon given back.”
Mrs. Lammle had taken up her parasol from a side table, and stood sketching with it on the pattern of the damask cloth, as she had sketched on the pattern of Mr. Twemlow’s papered wall.
“You will not undeceive her I hope, Mr. Boffin?” she said, turning her head towards him, but not her eyes.
“No,” said Mr. Boffin.
“I mean, as to the worth and value of her friend,” Mrs. Lammle explained, in a measured voice, and with an emphasis on her last word.
“No,” he returned. “I may try to give a hint at her home that she is in want of kind and careful protection, but I shall say no more than that to her parents, and I shall say nothing to the young lady herself.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Boffin,” said Mrs. Lammle, still sketching, and seeming to bestow great pains upon it, “there are not many people, I think, who, under the circumstances, would have been so considerate and sparing as you have been to me just now. Do you care to be thanked?”
“Thanks are always worth having,” said Mrs. Boffin, in her ready good nature.
“Then thank you both.”
“Sophronia,” asked her husband, mockingly, “are you sentimental?”
“Well, well, my good sir,” Mr. Boffin interposed, “it’s a very good thing to think well of another person, and it’s a very good thing to be thought well of by another person. Mrs. Lammle will be none the worse for it, if she is.”
“Much obliged. But I asked Mrs. Lammle if she was.”
She stood sketching on the table-cloth, with her face clouded and set, and was silent.
“Because,” said Alfred, “I am disposed to be sentimental myself, on your appropriation of the jewels and the money, Mr. Boffin. As our little Georgiana said, three five-pound notes are better than nothing, and if you sell a necklace you can buy things with the produce.”
“if you sell it,” was Mr. Boffin’s comment, as he put it in his pocket.
Alfred followed it with his looks, and also greedily pursued the notes until they vanished into Mr. Boffin’s waistcoat pocket. Then he directed a look, half exasperated and half jeering, at his wife. She still stood sketching; but, as she sketched, there was a struggle within her, which found expression in the depth of the few last lines the parasol point indented into the table-cloth, and then some tears fell from her eyes.
“Why, confound the woman,” exclaimed Lammle, “she is sentimental!”