so radiant with ingenuous honesty, that Mrs Lupin almost wondered not to
see a stained-glass Glory, such as the Saint wore in the church, shining
about his head.

A long pause succeeded. The old man, with increased restlessness,
changed his posture several times. Mrs Lupin and the young lady gazed
in silence at the counterpane. Mr Pecksniff toyed abstractedly with his
eye-glass, and kept his eyes shut, that he might ruminate the better.

'Eh?' he said at last, opening them suddenly, and looking towards the
bed. 'I beg your pardon. I thought you spoke. Mrs Lupin,' he continued,
slowly rising 'I am not aware that I can be of any service to you here.
The gentleman is better, and you are as good a nurse as he can have.
Eh?'

This last note of interrogation bore reference to another change
of posture on the old man's part, which brought his face towards Mr
Pecksniff for the first time since he had turned away from him.

'If you desire to speak to me before I go, sir,' continued that
gentleman, after another pause, 'you may command my leisure; but I
must stipulate, in justice to myself, that you do so as to a stranger,
strictly as to a stranger.'

Now if Mr Pecksniff knew, from anything Martin Chuzzlewit had expressed
in gestures, that he wanted to speak to him, he could only have found it
out on some such principle as prevails in melodramas, and in virtue of
which the elderly farmer with the comic son always knows what the dumb
girl means when she takes refuge in his garden, and relates her personal
memoirs in incomprehensible pantomime. But without stopping to make any