“It sounds to me so. Were you one of many children?” He shook his head.
“An only child?”
“No there was another. Dead long ago.”
“Father or mother alive?”
“Dead.”—
“And the rest of your relations?”
“Dead—if I ever had any living. I never heard of any.”
At this point of the dialogue Bella came in with a light step. She paused at the door a moment, hesitating whether to remain or retire; perplexed by finding that she was not observed.
“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.
“No, don’t go,” rejoined Mrs. Boffin, “because we are coming to business, instead of having begun it, and you belong to it as much now,