o tell me that your pretty niece was not brought here as a decoy
for the drunken boy downstairs?'

Although this hurried dialogue was carried on in a suppressed tone on
both sides, Ralph looked involuntarily round to ascertain that Kate had
not moved her position so as to be within hearing. His adversary saw the
advantage he had gained, and followed it up.

'Do you mean to tell me,' he asked again, 'that it is not so? Do you
mean to say that if he had found his way up here instead of me, you
wouldn't have been a little more blind, and a little more deaf, and a
little less flourishing, than you have been? Come, Nickleby, answer me
that.'

'I tell you this,' replied Ralph, 'that if I brought her here, as a
matter of business--'

'Ay, that's the word,' interposed Sir Mulberry, with a laugh. 'You're
coming to yourself again now.'

'--As a matter of business,' pursued Ralph, speaking slowly and firmly,
as a man who has made up his mind to say no more, 'because I thought she
might make some impression on the silly youth you have taken in hand
and are lending good help to ruin, I knew--knowing him--that it would be
long before he outraged her girl's feelings, and that unless he offended
by mere puppyism and emptiness, he would, with a little management,
respect the sex and conduct even of his usurer's niece. But if I thought
to draw him on more gently by this device, I did not think of subjecting
the girl to the licentiousness and brutality of so old a hand as you.
And now we understand each other.'

'Especially as there was nothing to be got by it--eh?' sneered Sir
Mulberry.

'Exactly so,' said Ralph. He had turned away, and looked over his
shoulder to make this last reply. The eyes of the two worthies met,
with an expression as if each rascal felt that there was no disguising
himself from the other; and Sir Mulberry Hawk shrugged his shoulders and
walked slowly out.

His friend closed the door, and looked restlessly towards the spot where
his niece still remained in the attitude in which he had left her. She
had flung herself heavily upon the couch, and with her head drooping
over the cushion, and her face hidden in her hands, seemed to be still
weeping in an agony of shame and grief.

Ralph would have walked into any poverty-stricken debtor's house, and
pointed him out to a bailiff, though in attendance upon a young child's
death-bed, without the smallest concern, because it would have been a
matter quite in the