up as soon as his back was turned, and when I put up the carriage steps, I shook out one of the pieces-she sprinkled the rest out of the window, I suppose, for there was none there afterwards, though I looked for 'em. There was only

one word on it, and that was this, if you must and will know. But remember! You're upon your oath, Misses Brown!"

Mrs. Brown knew that, she said. Rob, having nothing more to say, began to chalk, slowly and laboriously, on the table.

"D,'" the old woman read aloud, when he had formed the letter.

"Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?" he exclaimed, covering it with his hand, and turning impatiently upon her, "I won't have it read out. Be quiet, will you!"

"Then write large, Rob," she returned, repeating her secret signal; "for my eyes are not good, even at print.”

Muttering to himself, and returning to his work with an ill will, Rob went on with the word. As he bent his head down, the person for whose information he so unconsciously labored, moved from the door behind him to within a short stride of his shoulder, and looked eagerly towards the creeping track of his hand upon the table. At the same time, Alice, from her opposite chair, watched it narrowly as it shaped the letters, and repeated each one on her lips as he made it, without articulating it aloud. At the end of every letter her eyes and Mr. Dombey's met, as if each of them sought to be confirmed by the other; and thus they both spelt D. I. J. O. N.

"There!" said the Grinder, moistening the palm of his hand hastily, to obliterate the word; and not content with smearing it out, rubbing and planing all trace of it away with his coatsleeve, until the very color of the chalk was gone from the table. Now, I hope you 're contented, Misses Brown!"

The old woman, in token of her being so, released his arm and patted his back; and the Grinder, overcome with: mortification, cross-examination, and liquor, folded his arms on the table, laid his head upon them, and fell asleep.

Not until he had been heavily asleep some time, and was snoring roundly, did the old woman turn towards the door where Mr. Dombey stood concealed, and beckon him to come through the room, and pass out. Even then, she hovered

over Rob, ready to blind him with her hands, or strike his head down, if he should raise it while the secret step was crossing to the door. But though her glance took sharp cognisance of the sleeper, it was sharp too for the waking man; and when he touched her hand with his, and in spite of all his caution, made a chinking, golden sound, it was as bright and greedy as a raven's.

The daughter's dark gaze followed him to the door, and noted well how pale he was, and how his hurried tread indicated that the least delay was an insupportable restraint upon him, and how he was burning to be active and away. As he closed the door behind him, she looked round at her mother. The old woman trotted to her; opened bor hand to show what was within; and tightly closing it again in her jealousy and avarice, whispered:

"What will he do, Ally?"

"Mischief," said the daughter.
"Murder?" asked the old woman.

“He's a madman, in his wounded pride, and may do that, for anything we can say, or he either."

Her glance was brighter than her mother's, and the fire that shone in it was fiercer; but her face was colorless, even to her lips.

They said no more, but sat apart; the mother communing with her money; the daughter with her thoughts; the glance of each, shining in the gloom of the feebly lighted room. Rob slept and snored. The disregarded parrot only was in action. It twisted and pulled at the wires of its cage, with its crooked beak, and crawled up to the dome, and along its roof like a fly, and down again head foremost, and shook, and bit, and rattled at every slender bar, as if it knew its Master's danger, and was wild to force a passage out, and fly away to warn him of it.

CHAPTER XXIII.

MORE INTELLIGENCE.

THERE were two of the traitor's own blood-his renounced brother and sister-on whom the weight of his guilt rested almost more heavily, at this time, than on the man whom he had so deeply injured. Prying and tormenting as the world was, it did Mr. Dombey the service of nerving him to pursuit and revenge. It roused his passion, stung his pride, twisted the one idea of his life into a new shape, and made some gratification of his wrath, the object into which his whole intellectual existence resolved itself. All the stubbornness and implacability of his nature, all its hard impenetrable quality, all its gloom and moroseness, all its exaggerated sense of personal importance, all its jealous disposition to resent the least flaw in the ample recognition of his importance, by others, set this way like many streams united into one, and bore him on upon their tide. The most impetuously passionate and violently impulsive of mankind would have been a milder enemy to encounter than the sullen Mr. Dombey wrought to this. A wild beast would have been easier turned or soothed than the grave gentleman without a wrinkle in his starched cravat.

But the very intensity of his purpose became almost a substitute for action in it. While he was yet uninformed of the traitor's retreat, it served to divert his mind from his own calamity, and to entertain it with another prospect. The brother and sister of his false favorite had no such relief; everything in their history, past and present, gave his delinquency a more afflicting meaning to them.

The sister may have sometimes sadly thought that if she had remained with him the companion and friend she had been once, he might have escaped the crime into which he had fallen. If she ever thought so, it was still without regret for what she had done, without the least doubt of her duty, without

any pricing or enhancing of her self-devotion. But when this possibility presented itself to the erring and repentant brother, as it sometimes did, it smote upon his heart with such a keen, reproachful touch as he could hardly bear. No idea of retort upon his cruel brother came into his mind. New accusation of himself, fresh inward lamentings over his own unworthiness, and the ruin in which it was at once his consolation and his self-reproach that he did not stand alone, were the sole kind of reflections to which the discovery gave rise in him.

It was on the very same day whose evening set upon the last chapter, and when Mr. Dombey's world was busiest with the elopement of his wife, that the window of the room in which the brother and sister sat at their early breakfast, was darkened by the unexpected shadow of a man coming to the little porch which man was Perch the messenger.

"I've stepped over from Balls Pond at a early hour," said Mr. Perch, confidentially looking in at the room door, and stopping on the mat to wipe his shoes all round, which had no mud upon them, "agreeable to my instructions last night. They was, to be sure and bring a note to you, Mr. Carker, before you went out in the morning. I should have been here a good hour and a half ago," said Mr. Perch, meekly, "but for the state of health of Mrs. P., who I thought I should have lost in the night, I do assure you, five distinct times."

"Is your wife so ill?" asked Harriet.

66

Why you see," said Mr. Perch, first turning round to shut the door carefully, "she takes what has happened in our House so much to heart, miss.

you see, and soon unstrung.

Her nerves is so very delicate
Not but what the strongest

nerves had good need to be shook, I'm sure. You feel it very much yourself, no doubts."

Harriet repressed a sigh, and glanced at her brother.

"I'm sure I feel it myself, in my humble way," Mr. Perch went on to say, with a shake of his head, "in a manner

I couldn't have believed if I hadn't been called upon to undergo. It has almost the effect of drink upon me. I literally feels every morning as if I had been taking more than was good for me over-night."

Mr. Perch's appearance corroborated this recital of his symptoms. There was an air of feverish lassitude about it,

that seemed referable to drams; and which in fact, might no doubt have been traced to those numerous discoveries of himself in the bars of public-houses, being treated and questioned, which he was in the daily habit of making.

"Therefore I can judge," said Mr. Perch, shaking his head again, and speaking in a silvery murmur, "of the feelings of such as is at all peculiarly sitiwated in this most painful revelation."

Here Mr. Perch waited to be confided in; and receiving no confidence, coughed behind his hand. This leading to nothing, he coughed behind his hat; and that leading to nothing, he put his hat on the ground and sought in his breast pocket for the letter.

"If I rightly recollect, there was no answer," said Mr. Perch, with an affable smile; "but perhaps you'll be so good as cast your eye over it, sir."

John Carker broke the seal, which was Mr. Dombey's, and possessing himself of the contents, which were very brief, replied, "No. No answer is expected."

"Then I shall wish you good morning, miss," said Perch, taking a step toward the door, "and hoping, I'm sure, that you'll not permit yourself to be more reduced in mind than you can help, by the late painful rewelation. The Papers," said Mr. Perch, taking two steps back again, and comprehensively addressing both the brother and sister in a whisper of increased mystery, "is more eager for news of it than you'd suppose possible. One of the Sunday ones, in a blue cloak and a white hat, that had previously offered for to bribe meneed I say with what success?—was dodging about our court last night as late as twenty minutes after eight o'clock. I see him myself, with his eye at the counting-house keyhole, which being patent is impervious. Another one," said Mr. Perch, "with milintary frogs, is in the parlor of the King's Arms all the blessed day. I happened, last week, to let a little obserwation fall there, and next morning, which was Sunday, I see it worked up in print, in a most surprising manner.'

Mr. Perch resorted to his breast pocket, as if to produce the paragraph, but receiving no encouragement, pulled out his beaver gloves, picked up his hat, and took his leave; and before it was high noon, Mr. Perch had related to several select audiences at the King's Arms and elsewhere, how Miss