we can make a bargain of it. About nine or ten o'clock at night, say. Keep your eye upon him in the meanwhile, and don't talk about it. He's as mad as a March hare!"
"Madder!" cried Mrs. Gamp. "A deal madder!"
"See to him, then; take care that he does no harm; and recollect what I have told you."
Leaving Mrs. Gamp in the act of repeating all she had been told, and of producing in support of her memory and trustworthiness, many commendations selected from among the most remarkable opinions of the celebrated Mrs. Harris, he descended to the little room prepared for him, and pulling off his coat and his boots, put them outside the door before he locked it. In locking it, he was careful so to adjust the key, as to baffle any curious person who might try to peep in through the keyhole; and when he had taken these precautions, he sat down to his supper.
"Mr. Chuff," he muttered, "it'll be pretty easy to be even with you. It's of no use doing things by halves, and as long as I stop here, I 'll take-good care of you. When I am off, you may say what you please. But its a d—d strange thing," he added, pushing away his untouched plate, and striding moodily to and fro, "that his drivellings should have taken this turn just now."
After pacing the little room from end to end several times, he sat down in another chair.
"I say just now, but for anything I know, he may have been carrying on the same game all along. Old dog! He shall be gagged!"
He paced the room again in the same restless and unsteady way; and then sat down upon the bedstead, leaning his chin upon his hand, and looking at the table. When he had looked at it for a long time, he remembered his supper; and resuming the chair he had first occupied, began to eat with great rapacity: not like a hungry man, but as if he were determined to do it. He drank too, roundly; sometimes, stopping in the middle of a draught to walk, and change his seat and walk again, and dart back to the table and fall to, in a ravenous hurry, as before.
It was now growing dark. As the gloom of evening, deepening into night, came on, another dark shade emerging from within him seemed to overspread his face, and slowly change it. Slowly, slowly; darker and darker; more and more haggard; creeping over him by little and little; until it was black night within him and without.
The room in which he had shut himself up, was on the ground-floor, at the back of the house. It was lighted by a dirty skylight, and had a door in the wall, opening into a narrow covered passage or blind-alley, very little frequented after five or six o'clock in the evening, and not in much use as a thoroughfare at any hour. But it had an outlet in a neighbouring street.
The ground on which this chamber stood, had, at one time, not within his recollection, been a yard; and had been converted to its present purpose, for use as an office. But the occasion for it, died with the man who built it: and saving that it had sometimes served as an apology for a spare bed-room, and that the old clerk had once held it (but that was years ago) as his recognised apartment; it had been
