my mother. If there hadn't been over-
officiousness it wouldn't have been made, and
I hate over-officiousness at all times, whether
or no. Good evening!"

Although Mr. Bounderby carried it off in
these terms, holding the door open for the
company to depart, there was a blustering
sheepishness upon him, at once extremely
crest-fallen and superlatively absurd.
Detected as the Bully of humility, who had built
his windy reputation upon lies, and in his
boastfulness had put the honest truth as
far away from him as if he had advanced the
mean claim (there is no meaner) to tack
himself on to a pedigree, he cut a most
ridiculous figure. With the people filing off at
the door he held, who he knew would carry
what had passed to the whole town, to be
given to the four winds, he could not have
looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn, if he
had had his ears cropped. Even that unlucky
female Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle
of exultation into the Slough of Despond, was
not in so bad a plight as that remarkable
man and self-made Humbug, Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown.

Rachael and Sissy, leaving Mrs. Pegler to
occupy a bed at her son's for that night,
walked together to the gate of Stone Lodge and
there parted. Mr. Gradgrind joined them
before they had gone very far, and spoke with
much interest of Stephen Blackpool; for whom
he thought this signal failure of the suspicions
against Mrs. Pegler was likely to work well.

As to the whelp; throughout this scene as
on all other late occasions, he had stuck close
to Bounderby. He seemed to feel that as long
as Bounderby could make no discovery
without his knowledge, he was so far safe. He
never visited his sister, and had only seen her
once since she went home: that is to say, on
the night when he still stuck close to
Bounderby, as already related.

There was one dim unformed fear lingering
about his sister's mind, to which she never
gave utterance, which surrounded the graceless
and ungrateful boy with a dreadful mystery.
The same dark possibility had presented itself
in the same shapeless guise, this very day, to
Sissy, when Rachael spoke of some one who
would be confounded by Stephen's return,
having put him out of the way. Louisa had
never spoken of harboring any suspicion
of her brother, in connexion with the robbery;
she and Sissy had held no confidence on the
subject, save in that one interchange of looks
when the unconscious father rested his gray
head on his hand; but it was understood
between them, and they both knew it. This
other fear was so awful, that it hovered about
each of them like a ghostly shadow; neither
daring to think of its being near herself, far
less of its being near the other.

And still the forced spirit which the whelp
had plucked up, throve with him. If Stephen
Blackpool was not the thief, let him show
himself. Why didn't he?

Another night. Another day and night.
No Stephen Blackpool. Where was the man,
and why did he not come back?

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE Sunday was a bright Sunday in
autumn, clear and cool, when early in the
morning Sissy and Rachael met, to walk in
the country.

As Coketown cast ashes not only on its
own head but on the neighbourhood's too—
after the manner of those pious persons who
do penance for their own sins by putting
other people into sackcloth—it was customary
for those who now and then thirsted for a
draught of pure air, which is not absolutely
the most wicked among the vanities of life,
to get a few miles away by the railroad, and
then begin their walk, or their lounge in the
fields. Sissy and Rachael helped themselves
out of the smoke by the usual means, and
were put down at a station about midway
between the town and Mr. Bounderby's
retreat.

Though the green landscape was blotted
here and there with heaps of coal, it was
green elsewhere, and there were trees to see,
and there were larks singing (though it was
Sunday), and there were pleasant scents in the
air, and all was overarched by a bright blue sky.
In the distance one way, Coketown showed as a
black mist; in another distance, hills began
to rise; in a third, there was a faint change
in the light of the horizon, where it shone
upon the far-off sea. Under their feet, the
grass was fresh; beautiful shadows of branches
flickered upon it, and speckled it; hedgerows
were luxuriant; everything was at peace.
Engines at pits' mouths, and lean old horses
that had worn the circle of their daily labor
into the ground, were alike quiet; wheels had
ceased for a short space to turn; and the
great wheel of earth seemed to revolve
without the shocks and noises of another time.

They walked on, across the fields and down
the shady lanes, sometimes getting over a
fragment of a fence so rotten that it dropped
at a touch of the foot, sometimes passing near
a wreck of bricks and beams overgrown
with grass, marking the site of deserted
works. They followed paths and tracks,
however slight. Mounds where the grass
was rank and high, and where brambles,
dockweed and such-like vegetation, were
confusedly heaped together, they always avoided;
for dismal stories were told in that country
of the old pits hidden beneath such
indications.

The sun was high when they sat down to
rest. They had seen no one, near or distant,
for a long time; and the solitude remained
unbroken. " It is so still here, Rachael, and
the way is so untrodden, that I think we
must be the first who have been here all the
summer."

As Sissy said it, her eyes were attracted by
another of those rotten fragments of fence