Page:Bleak House.djvu/740

off his cloak, and was putting it about me. “That's a good move, too,” said Mr. Bucket, assisting, “a very good move.”

“May I go with you?” said Mr. Woodcourt. I don't know whether to me or my companion.

“Why, lord!” exclaimed Mr. Bucket, taking the answer on himself. “Of course you may.”

It was all said in a moment, and they took me between them, wrapped in the cloak.

“I have just left Richard,” said Mr. Woodcourt. “I have been sitting with him since ten o'clock last night.”

“O dear me, he is ill!”

“No, no, believe me; not ill, but not quite well. He was depressed and faint—you know he gets so worried and so worn sometimes—and Ada sent to me of course; and when I came home I found her note, and came straight here. Well! Richard revived so much after a little while, and Ada was so happy, and so convinced of its being my doing, though God knows I had little enough to do with it, that I remained with him until he had been fast asleep some hours. As fast asleep as she is now, I hope!”

His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had inspired my darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I separate all this from his promise to me? How thankless I must have been if it had not recalled the words he said to me, when he was so moved by the change in my appearance: “I will accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!”

We now turned into another narrow street. “Mr. Woodcourt,” said Mr. Bucket, who had eyed him closely as we came along, “our business takes us to a law-stationer's here; a certain Mr. Snagsby's. What, you know him, do you?” He was so quick that he saw it in an instant.

“Yes, I know a little of him, and have called upon him at this place.”

“Indeed, sir?” said Mr. Bucket. “Then will you be so good as to let me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment, while I go and have half a word with him?”

The last police officer with whom he had conferred was standing silently behind us. I was not aware of it until he struck in, on my saying I heard some one crying.

“Don't be alarmed, miss,” he returned. “It's Snagsby's servant.”

“Why, you see,” said Mr. Bucket, “the girl's subject to fits, and has 'em bad upon her to-night. A most contrairy circumstance it is, for I want certain information out of that girl, and she must be brought to reason somehow.”

“At all events, they wouldn't be up yet, if it wasn't for her, Mr. Bucket,” said the other man. “She's been at it pretty well all night, sir.”

“Well, that's true,” he returned. “My light's burnt out. Show your's a moment.”

All this passed in a whisper, a door or two from the house in which I could faintly hear crying and moaning. In the little round of light