t this time, was more the
manner of a young man towards a mother, than that of a Secretary towards
his employer's wife. It had always been marked by a subdued affectionate
deference that seemed to have sprung up on the very day of his
engagement; whatever was odd in her dress or her ways had seemed to have
no oddity for him; he had sometimes borne a quietly-amused face in her
company, but still it had seemed as if the pleasure her genial temper
and radiant nature yielded him, could have been quite as naturally
expressed in a tear as in a smile. The completeness of his sympathy with
her fancy for having a little John Harmon to protect and rear, he
had shown in every act and word, and now that the kind fancy was
disappointed, he treated it with a manly tenderness and respect for
which she could hardly thank him enough.

'But I do thank you, Mr Rokesmith,' said Mrs Boffin, 'and I thank you
most kindly. You love children.'

'I hope everybody does.'

'They ought,' said Mrs Boffin; 'but we don't all of us do what we ought,
do us?'

John Rokesmith replied, 'Some among us supply the short-comings of the
rest. You have loved children well, Mr Boffin has told me.'

Not a bit better than he has, but that's his way; he puts all the good
upon me. You speak rather sadly, Mr Rokesmith.'

'Do I?'

'It sounds to me so. Were you one of many children?' He shook his head.

'An only child?'

'No there was another. Dead long ago.'

'Father or mother alive?'

'Dead.'--

'And the rest of your relations?'

'Dead--if I ever had any living. I never heard of any.'

At this point of the dialogue Bella came in with a light step. She
paused at the door a moment, hesitating whether to remain or retire;
perplexed by finding that she was not observed.

'Now, don't mind an old lady's talk,' said Mrs Boffin, 'but tell me. Are
you quite sure, Mr Rokesmith, that you have never had a disappointment
in love?'

'Quite sure. Why do you ask me?'

'Why, for this reason. Sometimes you have a kind of kept-down manner
with you, which is not like your age. You can't be thirty?'

'I am not yet thirty.'

Deeming it high time to make her presence known, Bella coughed here to
attract attention, begged pardon, and said she would go, fearing that
she interrupted some matter of business.

'No, don't go,' rejoined Mrs Boffin, 'because we are coming to business,
instead of having begun it, and you belong to it as much now, my dear
Bella, as I do. B