“That’s right, my dear, don’t you mind him,” said Mrs. Boffin, “stick to me. Well! Then we sits down, gradually gets cool, and holds a confabulation. John, he tells us how he is despairing in his mind on accounts of a certain fair young person, and how, if I hadn’t found him out, he was going away to seek his fortune far and wide, and had fully meant never to come to life, but to leave the property as our wrongful inheritance forever and a day. At which you never see a man so frightened as my Noddy was. For to think that he should have come into the property wrongful, however innocent, and⁠—more than that⁠—might have gone on keeping it to his dying day, turned him whiter than chalk.”

“And you too,” said Mr. Boffin.