Page:Dickens - Our Mutual Friend, ed. Lang, 1897, vol.1.djvu/61

 companion, and, let him be put out as he may, never once strikes me."

The listening boy gave a grunt here, as much as to say,"But he strikes me though!"

"Those are some of the pictures of what is past, Charley."

"Cut away again,"said the boy,"and give us a fortune-telling one; a future one."

"Well! There am I, continuing with father, and holding to father, because father loves me, and I love father. I can't so much as read a book, because, if I had learned, father would have thought I was deserting him, and I should have lost my influence. I have not the influence I want to have, I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I go on in the hope and trust that the time will come. In the meanwhile I know that I am in some things a stay to father, and that if I was not faithful to him he would—in revengelike, or in disappointment, or both—go wild and bad."

"Give us a touch of the fortune-telling pictures about me."

"I was passing on to them, Charley,"said the girl, who had not changed her attitude since she began, and who now mournfully shook her head;"the others were all leading up. There are you——"

"Where am I, Liz?"

"Still in the hollow down by the flare."

"There seems to be the deuce-and-all in the hollow down by the flare,"said the boy, glancing from her eyes to the brazier, which had a grisly skeleton look on its long thin legs.

"There are you, Charley, working your way, in secret from father, at the school; and you get prizes; and you go on better and better; and you come to be a—what was it you called it when you told me about that?"

"Ha, ha! Fortune-telling not know the name!"cried the boy, seeming to be rather relieved by this default on the part of the hollow down by the flare."Pupil-teacher."

"You come to be a pupil-teacher, and you still go on better and better, and you rise to be a master full of learning