Nickleby.

'I should think he was,' returned Miss La Creevy; 'especially as young
Mr Cheeryble was with him.'

'Surely that is no reason why Mr Linkinwater should be coming here,'
said Kate.

'Why I think it is, my dear,' said Miss La Creevy. 'For a young man, Mr
Frank is not a very great walker; and I observe that he generally falls
tired, and requires a good long rest, when he has come as far as this.
But where is my friend?' said the little woman, looking about, after
having glanced slyly at Kate. 'He has not been run away with again, has
he?'

'Ah! where is Mr Smike?' said Mrs Nickleby; 'he was here this instant.'

Upon further inquiry, it turned out, to the good lady's unbounded
astonishment, that Smike had, that moment, gone upstairs to bed.

'Well now,' said Mrs Nickleby, 'he is the strangest creature! Last
Tuesday--was it Tuesday? Yes, to be sure it was; you recollect, Kate, my
dear, the very last time young Mr Cheeryble was here--last Tuesday night
he went off in just the same strange way, at the very moment the knock
came to the door. It cannot be that he don't like company, because he is
always fond of people who are fond of Nicholas, and I am sure young Mr
Cheeryble is. And the strangest thing is, that he does not go to bed;
therefore it cannot be because he is tired. I know he doesn't go to bed,
because my room is the next one, and when I went upstairs last Tuesday,
hours after him, I found that he had not even taken his shoes off; and
he had no candle, so he must have sat moping in the dark all the time.
Now, upon my word,' said Mrs Nickleby, 'when I come to think of it,
that's very extraordinary!'

As the hearers did not echo this sentiment, but remained profoundly
silent, either as not knowing what to say, or as being unwilling to
interrupt, Mrs Nickleby pursued the thread of her discourse after her
own fashion.

'I hope,' said that lady, 'that this unaccountable conduct may not be
the beginning of his taking to his bed and living there all his life,
like the Thirsty Woman of Tutbury, or the Cock-lane Ghost, or some of
those extraordinary creatures. One of them had some connection with
our family. I forget, without looking back to some old letters I have
upstairs, whether it was my great-grandfather who went to school with
the Cock-lane Ghost, or the Thirsty Woman of Tutbury who went to school
with my grandmother. Miss La Creevy, you know, of course. Which was it
that didn't mind what the cler