“Then what does he consider, sir?” asked Bella.
“Dashed if I know!” said Mr. Boffin. “It seemed at first as if it was only Lightwood that he objected to meet. And now it seems to be everybody, except you.”
Oho! thought Miss Bella. “In—deed! That’s it, is it!” For Mr. Mortimer Lightwood had dined there two or three times, and she had met him elsewhere, and he had shown her some attention. “Rather cool in a Secretary—and Pa’s lodger—to make me the subject of his jealousy!”
That Pa’s daughter should be so contemptuous of Pa’s lodger was odd; but there were odder anomalies than that in the mind of the spoilt girl: spoilt first by poverty, and then by wealth. Be it this history’s part, however, to leave them to unravel themselves.
“A little too much, I think,” Miss Bella reflected scornfully, “to have Pa’s lodger laying claim to me, and keeping eligible people off! A little too much, indeed, to have the opportunities opened to me by Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, appropriated by a mere Secretary and Pa’s lodger!”
Yet it was not so very long ago that Bella had been fluttered by the discovery that this same Secretary and lodger seem to like her. Ah! but the eminently aristocratic mansion and Mrs. Boffin’s dressmaker had not come into play then.
In spite of his seemingly retiring manners a very intrusive person, this Secretary and lodger, in Miss Bella’s opinion. Always a light in his office-room when we came home from the play or opera, and he always at the carriage-door to hand us out. Always a provoking radiance too on Mrs. Boffin’s face, and an abominably cheerful reception of him, as if it were possible seriously to approve what the man had in his mind!
“You never charge me, Miss Wilfer,” said the Secretary, encountering her by chance alone in the great drawing-room, “with commissions for