yer Mr Sampson Brass. Both gentlemen however were from home, nor
was the life and light of law, Miss Sally, at her post either. The
fact of their joint desertion of the office was made known to all
comers by a scrap of paper in the hand-writing of Mr Swiveller, which
was attached to the bell-handle, and which, giving the reader no clue
to the time of day when it was first posted, furnished him with the
rather vague and unsatisfactory information that that gentleman would
'return in an hour.'

'There's a servant, I suppose,' said the dwarf, knocking at the
house-door. 'She'll do.'

After a sufficiently long interval, the door was opened, and a small
voice immediately accosted him with, 'Oh please will you leave a card
or message?'

'Eh?' said the dwarf, looking down, (it was something quite new to him)
upon the small servant.

To this, the child, conducting her conversation as upon the occasion of
her first interview with Mr Swiveller, again replied, 'Oh please will
you leave a card or message?'

'I'll write a note,' said the dwarf, pushing past her into the office;
'and mind your master has it directly he comes home.' So Mr Quilp
climbed up to the top of a tall stool to write the note, and the small
servant, carefully tutored for such emergencies, looked on with her
eyes wide open, ready, if he so much as abstracted a wafer, to rush
into the street and give the alarm to the police.

As Mr Quilp folded his note (which was soon written: being a very short
one) he encountered the gaze of the small servant. He looked at her,
long and earnestly.

'How are you?' said the dwarf, moistening a wafer with horrible
grimaces.

The small servant, perhaps frightened by his looks, returned no audible
reply; but it appeared from the motion of her lips that she was
inwardly repeating the same form of expression concerning the note or
message.

'Do they use you ill here? is your mistress a Tartar?' said Quilp with
a chuckle.

In reply to the last interrogation, the small servant, with a look of
infinite cunning mingled with fear, screwed up her mouth very tight and
round, and nodded violently. Whether there was anything in the
peculiar slyness of her action which fascinated Mr Quilp, or anything
in the expression of her features at the moment which attracted his
attention for some other reason; or whether it merely occurred to him
as a pleasant whim to stare the small servant out of countenance;
certain it is, that