y, no, sir,' retorted Mr Flintwinch. 'Not unusually. Hadn't you
better be seated? You have been calling for some more of that port, sir,
I guess?'

'Ah, Little joker! Little pig!' cried the visitor. 'Ha ha ha ha!' And
throwing Mr Flintwinch away, as a closing piece of raillery, he sat down
again.

The amazement, suspicion, resentment, and shame, with which Arthur
looked on at all this, struck him dumb. Mr Flintwinch, who had spun
backward some two or three yards under the impetus last given to him,
brought himself up with a face completely unchanged in its stolidity
except as it was affected by shortness of breath, and looked hard at
Arthur. Not a whit less reticent and wooden was Mr Flintwinch outwardly,
than in the usual course of things: the only perceptible difference in
him being that the knot of cravat which was generally under his ear,
had worked round to the back of his head: where it formed an ornamental
appendage not unlike a bagwig, and gave him something of a courtly
appearance. As Mrs Clennam never removed her eyes from Blandois (on whom
they had some effect, as a steady look has on a lower sort of dog), so
Jeremiah never removed his from Arthur. It was as if they had tacitly
agreed to take their different provinces. Thus, in the ensuing silence,
Jeremiah stood scraping his chin and looking at Arthur as though he were
trying to screw his thoughts out of him with an instrument.

After a little, the visitor, as if he felt the silence irksome, rose,
and impatiently put himself with his back to the sacred fire which had
burned through so many years. Thereupon Mrs Clennam said, moving one of
her hands for the first time, and moving it very slightly with an action
of dismissal:

'Please to leave us to our business, Arthur.' 'Mother, I do so with
reluctance.'

'Never mind with what,' she returned, 'or with what not. Please to leave
us. Come back at any other time when you may consider it a duty to bury
half an hour wearily here. Good night.'

She held up her muffled fingers that he might touch them with his,
according to their usual custom, and he stood over her wheeled chair to
touch her face with his lips. He thought, then, that her cheek was
more strained than usual, and that it was colder. As he followed the
direction of her eyes, in rising again, towards Mr Flintwinch's good
friend, Mr Blandois, Mr Blandois snapped his finger and thumb with one
loud contemptuous snap.

'I leave your--your business ac