no, and
pour your speech into unwilling ears. Preach to the walls I tell you;
not to me!'

'I am no angel, Heaven knows,' returned brother Charles, shaking his
head, 'but an erring and imperfect man; nevertheless, there is
one quality which all men have, in common with the angels, blessed
opportunities of exercising, if they will; mercy. It is an errand of
mercy that brings me here. Pray let me discharge it.'

'I show no mercy,' retorted Ralph with a triumphant smile, 'and I
ask none. Seek no mercy from me, sir, in behalf of the fellow who has
imposed upon your childish credulity, but let him expect the worst that
I can do.'

'HE ask mercy at your hands!' exclaimed the old merchant warmly; 'ask it
at his, sir; ask it at his. If you will not hear me now, when you may,
hear me when you must, or anticipate what I would say, and take measures
to prevent our ever meeting again. Your nephew is a noble lad, sir, an
honest, noble lad. What you are, Mr Nickleby, I will not say; but what
you have done, I know. Now, sir, when you go about the business in which
you have been recently engaged, and find it difficult of pursuing, come
to me and my brother Ned, and Tim Linkinwater, sir, and we'll explain
it for you--and come soon, or it may be too late, and you may have it
explained with a little more roughness, and a little less delicacy--and
never forget, sir, that I came here this morning, in mercy to you, and
am still ready to talk to you in the same spirit.'

With these words, uttered with great emphasis and emotion, brother
Charles put on his broad-brimmed hat, and, passing Ralph Nickleby
without any other remark, trotted nimbly into the street. Ralph looked
after him, but neither moved nor spoke for some time: when he broke what
almost seemed the silence of stupefaction, by a scornful laugh.

'This,' he said, 'from its wildness, should be another of those dreams
that have so broken my rest of late. In mercy to me! Pho! The old
simpleton has gone mad.'

Although he expressed himself in this derisive and contemptuous manner,
it was plain that, the more Ralph pondered, the more ill at ease he
became, and the more he laboured under some vague anxiety and alarm,
which increased as the time passed on and no tidings of Newman Noggs
arrived. After waiting until late in the afternoon, tortured by various
apprehensions and misgivings, and the recollection of the warning which
his nephew had given him when they last met: the furthe