- Halloa, Jack! Don’t drink.’

‘Why not?’

‘Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns proposed! Pussy, Jack, and many of ‘em! Happy returns, I mean.’

Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended hand, as if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. Jasper drinks the toast in silence.

‘Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and all that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray! - And now, Jack, let’s have a little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers? Pass me one, and take the other.’ Crack. ‘How’s Pussy getting on Jack?’

‘With her music? Fairly.’

‘What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack! But I know, Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn’t she?’

‘She can learn anything, if she will.’

‘IF she will! Egad, that’s it. But if she won’t?’

Crack! - on Mr. Jasper’s part.

‘How’s she looking, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he returns: ‘Very like your sketch indeed.’

‘I AM a little proud of it,’ says the young fellow, glancing up at the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the air: ‘Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have caught that expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.’

Crack! - on Edwin Drood’s part.

Crack! - on Mr. Jasper’s part.

‘In point of fact,’ the former resumes, after some silent dipping among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, ‘I see it whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don’t find it on her face, I leave it there. - You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!’ With a twirl of the nut-crackers at the portrait.

Crack! crack! crack. Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part.

Crack. Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood.

Silence on both sides.

‘Have you lost your tongue, Jack?’

‘Have you found yours, Ned?’

‘No, but really; - isn’t it, you know, after all - ‘

Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly.

‘Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter? There, Jack! I tell you! If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from all the pretty girls in the world.’

‘But you have not got to choose.’

‘That’s what I complain of. My dead and gone father and Pussy’s dead and gone father must needs marry us together by anticipation. Why the - Devil, I was going to say, if it had been respectful to their memory - couldn’t they leave us alone?’

‘Tut, tut, dear boy,’ Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of gentle deprecation.

‘Tut, tut? Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for YOU. YOU can take it easily. YOUR life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out for you, like a surveyor’s plan. YOU have no uncomfortable suspicion that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her. YOU can choose for yourself. Life, for YOU, is a plum with the natural bloom on; it hasn’t been over-carefully wiped off for YOU - ‘

‘Don’t stop, dear fellow. Go on.’

‘Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?’

‘How can you have hurt my feelings?’

‘Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill! There’s a strange film come over your eyes.’

Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. After a while he says faintly:

‘I have been taking opium for a pain - an agony - that sometimes overcomes me. The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone directly.