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552 "I am very much disturbed by what you tell me," said Nicholas, after a little reflection, "though I yet hope you may be mistaken."

"I don't understand why you should hope so," said Mrs. Nickleby, "I confess; but you may depend upon it I am not."

"What of Kate?" inquired Nicholas.

"Why that, my dear," returned Mrs. Nickleby, "is just the point upon which I am not yet satisfied. During this sickness, she has been constantly at Madeline's bedside—never were two people so fond of each other as they have grown—and to tell you the truth, Nicholas, I have rather kept her away now and then, because I think it's a good plan, and urges a young man on. He doesn't get too sure, you know."

She said this with such a mingling of high delight and self-congratulation, that it was inexpressibly painful to Nicholas to dash her hopes; but he felt that there was only one honourable course before him, and that he was bound to take it.

"Dear mother," he said kindly, "don't you see that if there really were any serious inclination on the part of Mr. Frank towards Kate, and we suffered ourselves for one moment to encourage it, we should be acting a most dishonourable and ungrateful part? I ask you if you don't see it, but I need not say that, I know you don't, or you would have been more strictly upon your guard. Let me explain my meaning to you—remember how poor we are."

Mrs. Nickleby shook her head, and said through her tears that poverty was not a crime.

"No," said Nicholas, "and for that very reason poverty should engender an honest pride, that it may not lead and tempt us to unworthy actions, and that we may preserve the self-respect which a hewer of wood and drawer of water may maintain—and does better in maintaining than a monarch his. Think what we owe to these two brothers; remember what they have done and do every day for us with a generosity and delicacy for which the devotion of our whole lives would be a most imperfect and inadequate return. What kind of return would that be which would be comprised in our permitting their nephew, their only relative, whom they regard as a son, and for whom it would be mere childishness to suppose they have not formed plans suitably adapted to the education he has had, and the fortune he will inherit—in our permitting him to marry a portionless girl so closely connected with us, that the irresistible inference must be that he was entrapped by a plot; that it was a deliberate scheme and a speculation amongst us three. Bring the matter clearly before yourself, mother. Now, how would you feel if they were married, and the brothers coming here on one of those kind errands which bring them here so often, you had to break out to them the truth? Would you be at ease, and feel that you had played an honest, open, part?"

Poor Mrs. Nickleby, crying more and more, murmured that of course Mr. Frank would ask the consent of his uncles first.

"Why, to be sure, that would place him in a better situation with them," said Nicholas, "but we should still be open to the same suspicions, the distance between us would still be as great, the advantages