ho have been better hid than
she; and I know quarters in which a guinea or two, carefully spent, will
often solve darker riddles than this. Ay, and keep them close too, if
need be! I hear my man ringing at the door. We may as well part. You had
better not come to and fro, but wait till you hear from me.'

'Good!' returned Squeers. 'I say! If you shouldn't find her out, you'll
pay expenses at the Saracen, and something for loss of time?'

'Well,' said Ralph, testily; 'yes! You have nothing more to say?'

Squeers shaking his head, Ralph accompanied him to the streetdoor, and
audibly wondering, for the edification of Newman, why it was fastened
as if it were night, let him in and Squeers out, and returned to his own
room.

'Now!' he muttered, 'come what come may, for the present I am firm and
unshaken. Let me but retrieve this one small portion of my loss and
disgrace; let me but defeat him in this one hope, dear to his heart as
I know it must be; let me but do this; and it shall be the first link in
such a chain which I will wind about him, as never man forged yet.'

CHAPTER 57

How Ralph Nickleby's Auxiliary went about his Work, and how he prospered
with it

It was a dark, wet, gloomy night in autumn, when in an upper room of a
mean house situated in an obscure street, or rather court, near Lambeth,
there sat, all alone, a one-eyed man grotesquely habited, either
for lack of better garments or for purposes of disguise, in a loose
greatcoat, with arms half as long again as his own, and a capacity of
breadth and length which would have admitted of his winding himself
in it, head and all, with the utmost ease, and without any risk of
straining the old and greasy material of which it was composed.

So attired, and in a place so far removed from his usual haunts and
occupations, and so very poor and wretched in its character, perhaps Mrs
Squeers herself would have had some difficulty in recognising her lord:
quickened though her natural sagacity doubtless would have been by the
affectionate yearnings and impulses of a tender wife. But Mrs Squeers's
lord it was; and in a tolerably disconsolate mood Mrs Squeers's lord
appeared to be, as, helping himself from a black bottle which stood on
the table beside him, he cast round the chamber a look, in which very
slight regard for the objects within view was plainly mingled with some
regretful and impatient recollection of distant scenes and persons.

There were, certa