ledger before him, but again and again the
same train of thought came back despite all his efforts to prevent it,
confusing him in his calculations, and utterly distracting his attention
from the figures over which he bent. At length Ralph laid down his pen,
and threw himself back in his chair as though he had made up his mind to
allow the obtrusive current of reflection to take its own course, and,
by giving it full scope, to rid himself of it effectually.

'I am not a man to be moved by a pretty face,' muttered Ralph sternly.
'There is a grinning skull beneath it, and men like me who look and work
below the surface see that, and not its delicate covering. And yet
I almost like the girl, or should if she had been less proudly and
squeamishly brought up. If the boy were drowned or hanged, and the
mother dead, this house should be her home. I wish they were, with all
my soul.'

Notwithstanding the deadly hatred which Ralph felt towards Nicholas,
and the bitter contempt with which he sneered at poor Mrs
Nickleby--notwithstanding the baseness with which he had behaved, and
was then behaving, and would behave again if his interest prompted
him, towards Kate herself--still there was, strange though it may seem,
something humanising and even gentle in his thoughts at that moment. He
thought of what his home might be if Kate were there; he placed her in
the empty chair, looked upon her, heard her speak; he felt again upon
his arm the gentle pressure of the trembling hand; he strewed his
costly rooms with the hundred silent tokens of feminine presence and
occupation; he came back again to the cold fireside and the silent
dreary splendour; and in that one glimpse of a better nature, born as
it was in selfish thoughts, the rich man felt himself friendless,
childless, and alone. Gold, for the instant, lost its lustre in his
eyes, for there were countless treasures of the heart which it could
never purchase.

A very slight circumstance was sufficient to banish such reflections
from the mind of such a man. As Ralph looked vacantly out across the
yard towards the window of the other office, he became suddenly aware of
the earnest observation of Newman Noggs, who, with his red nose almost
touching the glass, feigned to be mending a pen with a rusty fragment of
a knife, but was in reality staring at his employer with a countenance
of the closest and most eager scrutiny.

Ralph exchanged his dreamy posture for his accustomed busine