“Now, don’t mind an old lady’s talk,” said Mrs. Boffin, “but tell me. Are you quite sure, Mr. Rokesmith, that you have never had a disappointment in love?”

“Quite sure. Why do you ask me?”

“Why, for this reason. Sometimes you have a kind of kept-down manner with you, which is not like your age. You can’t be thirty?”

“I am not yet thirty.”

Deeming it high time to make her presence known, Bella coughed here to attract attention, begged pardon, and said she would go, fearing that she interrupted some matter of business.