ad 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 recommend 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 furtively, but
fixedly, at Kate, 'and yet I would not. I would spare the feelings of
his--of his sister. And his mother of course,' added Ralph, as though by
an afterthought, and with far less emphasis.

Kate very well understood that this was held out as an additional
inducement to her to preserve the strictest silence regarding the events
of the preceding night. She looked involuntaril