“It’s quite new to me,” said Lizzie, “to be visited by a lady so nearly of my own age, and so pretty, as you. It’s a pleasure to me to look at you.”
“I have nothing left to begin with,” returned Bella, blushing, “because I was going to say that it was a pleasure to me to look at you, Lizzie. But we can begin without a beginning, can’t we?”
Lizzie took the pretty little hand that was held out in as pretty a little frankness.
“Now, dear,” said Bella, drawing her chair a little nearer, and taking Lizzie’s arm as if they were going out for a walk, “I am commissioned with something to say, and I dare say I shall say it wrong, but I won’t if I can help it. It is in reference to your letter to Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, and this is what it is. Let me see. Oh yes! This is what it is.”
With this exordium, Bella set forth that request of Lizzie’s touching secrecy, and delicately spoke of that false accusation and its retraction, and asked might she beg to be informed whether it had any bearing, near or remote, on such request. “I feel, my dear,” said Bella, quite amazing herself by the businesslike manner in which she was getting on, “that the subject must be a painful one to you, but I am mixed up in it also; for—I don’t know whether you may know it or suspect it—I am the willed-away girl who was to have been married to the unfortunate gentleman, if he had been pleased to approve of me. So I was dragged into the subject without my consent, and you were dragged into it without your consent, and there is very little to choose between us.”
“I had no doubt,” said Lizzie, “that you were the Miss Wilfer I have often heard named. Can you tell me who my unknown friend is?”
“Unknown friend, my dear?” said Bella.
“Who caused the charge against poor father to be contradicted, and sent me the written paper.”