ure! Peep at him while I ask the way,' said Nicholas. 'Come
down a step or two. Come!'

Drawing her after him, Nicholas crept down the steps and looked into
a small boarded cellar. There, amidst clothes-baskets and clothes,
stripped up to his shirt-sleeves, but wearing still an old patched
pair of pantaloons of superlative make, a once brilliant waistcoat,
and moustache and whiskers as of yore, but lacking their lustrous
dye--there, endeavouring to mollify the wrath of a buxom female--not
the lawful Madame Mantalini, but the proprietress of the concern--and
grinding meanwhile as if for very life at the mangle, whose creaking
noise, mingled with her shrill tones, appeared almost to deafen
him--there was the graceful, elegant, fascinating, and once dashing
Mantalini.

'Oh you false traitor!' cried the lady, threatening personal violence on
Mr Mantalini's face.

'False! Oh dem! Now my soul, my gentle, captivating, bewitching, and
most demnebly enslaving chick-a-biddy, be calm,' said Mr Mantalini,
humbly.

'I won't!' screamed the woman. 'I'll tear your eyes out!'

'Oh! What a demd savage lamb!' cried Mr Mantalini.

'You're never to be trusted,' screamed the woman; 'you were out all day
yesterday, and gallivanting somewhere I know. You know you were! Isn't
it enough that I paid two pound fourteen for you, and took you out of
prison and let you live here like a gentleman, but must you go on like
this: breaking, my heart besides?'

'I will never break its heart, I will be a good boy, and never do so any
more; I will never be naughty again; I beg its little pardon,' said
Mr Mantalini, dropping the handle of the mangle, and folding his palms
together; 'it is all up with its handsome friend! He has gone to the
demnition bow-wows. It will have pity? It will not scratch and claw, but
pet and comfort? Oh, demmit!'

Very little affected, to judge from her action, by this tender appeal,
the lady was on the point of returning some angry reply, when Nicholas,
raising his voice, asked his way to Piccadilly.

Mr Mantalini turned round, caught sight of Kate, and, without another
word, leapt at one bound into a bed which stood behind the door, and
drew the counterpane over his face: kicking meanwhile convulsively.

'Demmit,' he cried, in a suffocating voice, 'it's little Nickleby! Shut
the door, put out the candle, turn me up in the bedstead! Oh, dem, dem,
dem!'

The woman looked, first at Nicholas, and then at Mr Mantalini, a