“That’s right, my dear, don’t you mind him,” said Mrs. Boffin, “stick to me. Well! Then we sits down, gradually gets cool, and holds a confabulation. John, he tells us how he is despairing in his mind on accounts of a certain fair young person, and how, if I hadn’t found him out, he was going away to seek his fortune far and wide, and had fully meant never to come to life, but to leave the property as our wrongful inheritance for ever and a day. At which you never see a man so frightened as my Noddy was. For to think that he should have come into the property wrongful, however innocent, and — more than that — might have gone on keeping it to his dying day, turned him whiter than chalk.”

“And you too,” said Mr. Boffin.

“Don’t you mind him, neither, my deary,” resumed Mrs. Boffin; “stick to me. This brings up a confabulation regarding the certain fair young person; when Noddy he gives it as his opinion that she is a deary creetur. ‘She may be a leetle spoilt, and nat’rally spoilt,’ he says, ‘by circumstances, but that’s only the surface, and I lay my life,’ he says, ‘that she’s the true golden gold at heart.’ ”

“So did you,” said Mr. Boffin.

“Don’t you mind him a single morsel, my dear,” proceeded Mrs. Boffin, “but stick to me. Then says John, O, if he could but prove so! Then we both of us ups and says, that minute, ‘Prove so!’ ”

With a start, Bella directed a hurried glance towards Mr. Boffin. But, he was sitting thoughtfully smiling at that broad brown hand of his, and either didn’t see it, or would take no notice of it.

“ ‘Prove it, John!’ we says,” repeated Mrs. Boffin. “ ‘Prove it and overcome your doubts with triumph, and be happy for the first time in your life, and for the rest of your life.’ This puts John in a state, to be sure. Then we says, ‘What will content you? If she was to stand up for you when you was slighted, if she was to show herself of a generous mind when you was oppressed, if she was to be truest to you when you was poorest and friendliest, and all this against her own seeming interest, how would that do?’ ‘Do?’ says John, ‘it would raise me to the skies.’ ‘Then,’ says my Noddy, ‘make your preparations for the ascent, John, it being my firm belief that up you go!’ ”

Bella caught Mr. Boffin’s twinkling eye for half an instant; but he got it away from her, and restored it to his broad brown hand.

“From the first, you was always a special favourite of Noddy’s,” said Mrs. Boffin, shaking her head. “O you were! And if I had been inclined to be jealous, I don’t know what I mightn’t have done to you. But as I wasn’t — why, my beauty,” with a hearty laugh and an embrace, “I made you a special favourite of my own too. But the horses is coming round the corner. Well! Then says my Noddy, shaking his sides till he was fit to make ’em ache again: ‘Look out for being slighted and oppressed, John, for if ever a man had a hard master, you shall find me from this present time to be such to you. And then he began!” cried Mrs. Boffin, in an ecstacy of admiration. “Lord bless you, then he began! And how he did begin; didn’t he!”

Bella looked half frightened, and yet half laughed.

“But, bless you,” pursued Mrs. Boffin, “if you could have seen him of a night, at that time of it! The way he’d sit and chuckle over himself! The way he’d say ‘I’ve been a regular brown bear to-day,’ and take himself in his arms and hug himself at the thoughts of the brute he had pretended. But every night he says to me: ‘Better and better, old lady. What did we say of her? She’ll come through it, the true golden gold. This’ll be the happiest piece of work we ever done.’ And then he’d say, ‘I’ll be a grislier old growler to- morrow!’ and laugh, he would, till John and me was often forced to slap his back, and bring it out of his windpipes with a little water.”

Mr. Boffin, with his face bent over his heavy hand, made no sound, but rolled his shoulders when thus referred to, as if he were vastly enjoying himself.