freshments from a tray on
the table.

'I shall not drink my love to you, Paul,' said Louisa: 'I shall drink to
the little Dombey. Good gracious me!--it's the most astonishing thing I
ever knew in all my days, he's such a perfect Dombey.'

Quenching this expression of opinion in a short hysterical laugh which
terminated in tears, Louisa cast up her eyes, and emptied her glass.

'I know it's very weak and silly of me,' she repeated, 'to be so trembly
and shaky from head to foot, and to allow my feelings so completely
to get the better of me, but I cannot help it. I thought I should have
fallen out of the staircase window as I came down from seeing dear
Fanny, and that tiddy ickle sing.' These last words originated in a
sudden vivid reminiscence of the baby.

They were succeeded by a gentle tap at the door.

'Mrs Chick,' said a very bland female voice outside, 'how are you now,
my dear friend?'

'My dear Paul,' said Louisa in a low voice, as she rose from her seat,
'it's Miss Tox. The kindest creature! I never could have got here
without her! Miss Tox, my brother Mr Dombey. Paul, my dear, my very
particular friend Miss Tox.'

The lady thus specially presented, was a long lean figure, wearing such
a faded air that she seemed not to have been made in what linen-drapers
call 'fast colours' originally, and to have, by little and little,
washed out. But for this she might have been described as the very pink
of general propitiation and politeness. From a long habit of listening
admiringly to everything that was said in her presence, and looking at
the speakers as if she were mentally engaged in taking off impressions
of their images upon her soul, never to part with the same but with
life, her head had quite settled on one side. Her hands had contracted
a spasmodic habit of raising themselves of their own accord as in
involuntary admiration. Her eyes were liable to a similar affection. She
had the softest voice that ever was heard; and her nose, stupendously
aquiline, had a little knob in the very centre or key-stone of the
bridge, whence it tended downwards towards her face, as in an invincible
determination never to turn up at anything.

Miss Tox's dress, though perfectly genteel and good, had a certain
character of angularity and scantiness. She was accustomed to wear
odd weedy little flowers in her bonnets and caps. Strange grasses were
sometimes perceived in her hair; and it was observed by the curious,
of all he