“⁠—And beneath him too,” pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin.

“Don’t you know the Doctor better,” said I, “than to suppose him conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?”

He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered:

“Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor man! I mean Mr. Maldon!”

My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor’s happiness and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow’s twisting.