Chapter 32

Chapter 15

THE WHOLE CASE SO FAR

Bradley Headstone held fast by that other interview he was to
have with Lizzie Hexam. In stipulating for it, he had been
impelled by a feeling little short of desperation, and the feeling
abided by him. It was very soon after his interview with the
Secretary, that he and Charley Hexam set out one leaden evening,
not unnoticed by Miss Peecher, to have this desperate interview
accomplished.

'That dolls' dressmaker,' said Bradley, 'is favourable neither to me
nor to you, Hexam.'

'A pert crooked little chit, Mr Headstone! I knew she would put
herself in the way, if she could, and would be sure to strike in with
something impertinent. It was on that account that I proposed our
going to the City to-night and meeting my sister.'

'So I supposed,' said Bradley, getting his gloves on his nervous
hands as he walked. 'So I supposed.'

'Nobody but my sister,' pursued Charley, 'would have found out
such an extraordinary companion. She has done it in a ridiculous
fancy of giving herself up to another. She told me so, that night
when we went there.'

'Why should she give herself up to the dressmaker?' asked
Bradley.

'Oh!' said the boy, colouring. 'One of her romantic ideas! I tried
to convince her so, but I didn't succeed. However, what we have
got to do, is, to succeed to-night, Mr Headstone, and then all the
rest follows.'

'You are still sanguine, Hexam.'

'Certainly I am, sir. Why, we have everything on our side.'

'Except your sister, perhaps,' thought Bradley. But he only
gloomily thought it, and said nothing.

'Everything on our side,' repeated the boy with boyish confidence.
'Respectability, an excellent connexion for me, common sense,
everything!'

'To be sure, your sister has always shown herself a devoted sister,'
said Bradley, willing to sustain himself on even that low ground of
hope.

'Naturally, Mr Headstone, I have a good deal of influence with
her. And now that you have honoured me with your confidence
and spoken to me first, I say again, we have everything on our
side.'

And Bradley thought again, 'Except your sister, perhaps.'

A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful
aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death
about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of
mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-
encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems
descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial
on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having
failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever;
melancholy waifs and strays of