ght be--' Here Miss Snevellicci stopped, as though
waiting to be questioned, but no questioning came, for Nicholas was
thinking about more serious matters.

'How kind it is of you,' resumed Miss Snevellicci, after a short
silence, 'to sit waiting here for him night after night, night after
night, no matter how tired you are; and taking so much pains with him,
and doing it all with as much delight and readiness as if you were
coining gold by it!'

'He well deserves all the kindness I can show him, and a great deal
more,' said Nicholas. 'He is the most grateful, single-hearted,
affectionate creature that ever breathed.'

'So odd, too,' remarked Miss Snevellicci, 'isn't he?'

'God help him, and those who have made him so; he is indeed,' rejoined
Nicholas, shaking his head.

'He is such a devilish close chap,' said Mr Folair, who had come up a
little before, and now joined in the conversation. 'Nobody can ever get
anything out of him.'

'What SHOULD they get out of him?' asked Nicholas, turning round with
some abruptness.

'Zooks! what a fire-eater you are, Johnson!' returned Mr Folair, pulling
up the heel of his dancing shoe. 'I'm only talking of the natural
curiosity of the people here, to know what he has been about all his
life.'

'Poor fellow! it is pretty plain, I should think, that he has not the
intellect to have been about anything of much importance to them or
anybody else,' said Nicholas.

'Ay,' rejoined the actor, contemplating the effect of his face in a lamp
reflector, 'but that involves the whole question, you know.'

'What question?' asked Nicholas.

'Why, the who he is and what he is, and how you two, who are so
different, came to be such close companions,' replied Mr Folair,
delighted with the opportunity of saying something disagreeable. 'That's
in everybody's mouth.'

'The "everybody" of the theatre, I suppose?' said Nicholas,
contemptuously.

'In it and out of it too,' replied the actor. 'Why, you know, Lenville
says--'

'I thought I had silenced him effectually,' interrupted Nicholas,
reddening.

'Perhaps you have,' rejoined the immovable Mr Folair; 'if you have, he
said this before he was silenced: Lenville says that you're a regular
stick of an actor, and that it's only the mystery about you that has
caused you to go down with the people here, and that Crummles keeps
it up for his own sake; though Lenville says he don't believe there's
anything at all in it, except your having g