Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as he goes down-stairs.  He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his hand the pupil’s hat.

‘We have had an awful scene with him,’ says Jasper, in a low voice.

‘Has it been so bad as that?’

‘Murderous!’

Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates:  ’No, no, no.  Do not use such strong words.’

’He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet.  It is no fault of his, that he did not.  But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and strong with him, he would have cut him down on my hearth.’

The phrase smites home.  ‘Ah!’ thinks Mr. Crisparkle, ’his own words!’

‘Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have heard,’ adds Jasper, with great earnestness, ’I shall never know peace of mind when there is danger of those two coming together, with no one else to interfere.  It was horrible.  There is something of the tiger in his dark blood.’

‘Ah!’ thinks Mr. Crisparkle, ‘so he said!’

‘You, my dear sir,’ pursues Jasper, taking his hand, ’even you, have accepted a dangerous charge.’

‘You need have no fear for me, Jasper,’ returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a quiet smile.  ‘I have none for myself.’

‘I have none for myself,’ returns Jasper, with an emphasis on the last pronoun, ’because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of his hostility.  But you may be, and my dear boy has been.  Good night!’

Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so almost imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his hall; hangs it up; and goes thoughtfully to bed.

CHAPTER IX—­BIRDS IN THE BUSH

Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, from the seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ House, and no mother but Miss Twinkleton.  Her remembrance of her own mother was of a pretty little creature like herself (not much older than herself it seemed to her), who had been brought home in her father’s arms, drowned.  The fatal accident had happened at a party of pleasure.  Every fold and colour in the pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair, with scattered petals of ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the dead young figure, in its sad, sad beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed indelibly in Rosa’s recollection.  So were the wild despair and the subsequent bowed-down grief of her poor young father, who died broken-hearted on the first anniversary of that hard day.

The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of mental distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood:  who likewise had been left a widower in his youth.  But he, too, went the silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some sooner, and some later; and thus the young couple had come to be as they were.