fession--to say nothing of that
other gentleman having been my lodger, and having partaken, as one may
say, of the hospitality of my roof--I think you might have given me the
refusal of this offer in the first instance. I do indeed. Now, my
dear Sir,' cried Brass, seeing that the Notary was about to interrupt
him, 'suffer me to speak, I beg.'

Mr Witherden was silent, and Brass went on.

'If you will do me the favour,' he said, holding up the green shade,
and revealing an eye most horribly discoloured, 'to look at this, you
will naturally inquire, in your own minds, how did I get it. If you
look from that, to my face, you will wonder what could have been the
cause of all these scratches. And if from them to my hat, how it came
into the state in which you see it. Gentlemen,' said Brass, striking
the hat fiercely with his clenched hand, 'to all these questions I
answer--Quilp!'

The three gentlemen looked at each other, but said nothing.

'I say,' pursued Brass, glancing aside at his sister, as though he were
talking for her information, and speaking with a snarling malignity, in
violent contrast to his usual smoothness, 'that I answer to all these
questions,--Quilp--Quilp, who deludes me into his infernal den, and
takes a delight in looking on and chuckling while I scorch, and burn,
and bruise, and maim myself--Quilp, who never once, no never once, in
all our communications together, has treated me otherwise than as a
dog--Quilp, whom I have always hated with my whole heart, but never so
much as lately. He gives me the cold shoulder on this very matter as
if he had had nothing to do with it, instead of being the first to
propose it. I can't trust him. In one of his howling, raving, blazing
humours, I believe he'd let it out, if it was murder, and never think
of himself so long as he could terrify me. Now,' said Brass, picking
up his hat again and replacing the shade over his eye, and actually
crouching down, in the excess of his servility, 'What does all this
lead to?--what should you say it led me to, gentlemen?--could you guess
at all near the mark?'

Nobody spoke. Brass stood smirking for a little while, as if he had
propounded some choice conundrum; and then said:

'To be short with you, then, it leads me to this. If the truth has
come out, as it plainly has in a manner that there's no standing up
against--and a very sublime and grand thing is Truth, gentlemen, in its
way, though like other sublime