Mr. Boffin eyed him as a dog might eye another dog who wanted his bone; and actually retorted with a low growl, as the dog might have retorted.

“Good night,” he said, after having sunk into a moody silence, with his hands clasped behind him, and his eyes suspiciously wandering about Wegg.⁠—“No! stop there. I know the way out, and I want no light.”

Avarice, and the evening’s legends of avarice, and the inflammatory effect of what he had seen, and perhaps the rush of his ill-conditioned blood to his brain in his descent, wrought Silas Wegg to such a pitch of insatiable appetite, that when the door closed he made a swoop at it and drew Venus along with him.

“He mustn’t go,” he cried. “We mustn’t let him go? He has got that bottle about him. We must have that bottle.”

“Why, you wouldn’t take it by force?” said Venus, restraining him.