long way off, and if I went wholly unexpected, I should frighten them. If you can spare time to tell them you have seen me, and that I shall be with them a quarter of an hour afterwards, you will do me a great service."
"I wish I could do you, or any of you, a greater," said Miss La Creevy; "but the power to serve is as seldom joined with the will, as the will with the power."
Talking on very fast and very much. Miss La Creevy finished her breakfast with great expedition; put away the tea-caddy and hid the key under the fender, resumed her bonnet, and, taking Nicholas's arm, sallied forth at once to the city. Nicholas left her near the door of his mother’s house, and promised to return within a quarter of an hour at furthest.
It so chanced that Ralph Nickleby, at length seeing fit, for his own purposes, to communicate the atrocities of which Nicholas had been guilty, had (instead of first proceeding to another quarter of the town on business, as Newman Noggs supposed he would), gone straight to his sister-in-law. Hence when Miss La Creevy, admitted by a girl who was cleaning the house, made her way to the sitting-room, she found Mrs. Nickleby and Kate in tears, and Ralph just concluding his statement of his nephew's misdemeanours. Kate beckoned her not to retire, and Miss La Creevy took a seat in silence.
"You are here already, are you, my gentleman?" thought the little woman. "Then he shall announce himself, and see what effect that has on you."
"This is pretty," said Ralph, folding up Miss Squeers's note; "very pretty. I recommended him—against all my previous conviction, for I knew he would never do any good—to a man with whom, behaving himself properly, he might have remained in comfort for years. What is the result ? Conduct, for which he might hold up his hand at the Old Bailey."
"I never will believe it," said Kate, indignantly; "never. It is some base conspiracy, which carries its own falsehood with it."
"My dear," said Ralph, "you wrong the worthy man. These are not inventions. The man is assaulted, your brother is not to be found; this boy, of whom they speak, goes with him—remember, remember."
"It is impossible," said Kate. "Nicholas!—and a thief, too! Mama, how can you sit and hear such statements?"
Poor Mrs. Nickleby, who had at no time been remarkable for the possession of a very clear understanding, and who had been reduced by the late changes in her affairs to a most complicated state of perplexity, made no other reply to this earnest remonstrance than exclaiming from behind a mass of pocket-handkerchief, that she never could have believed it—thereby most ingeniously leaving her hearers to suppose that she did believe it.
"It would be my duty, if he came in my way, to deliver him up to justice," said Ralph, "my bounden duty; I should have no other course, as a man of the world and a man of business, to pursue. And yet," said Ralph, speaking in a very marked manner, and looking
