 and just
when Kit was looking at her eyelashes and wondering - quite in the simplicity of
his heart - what colour her eyes might be, it perversely happened that Barbara
raised her head a little to look at him, when both pair of eyes were hastily
withdrawn, and Kit leant over his plate, and Barbara over her pea-shells, each
in extreme confusion at having been detected by the other.
 

                                 Chapter XXIII

Mr. Richard Swiveller wending homeward from the Wilderness (for such was the
appropriate name of Quilp's choice retreat), after a sinuous and corkscrew
fashion, with many checks and stumbles; after stopping suddenly and staring
about him, then as suddenly running forward for a few paces, and as suddenly
halting again and shaking his head; doing everything with a jerk and nothing by
premeditation; - Mr. Richard Swiveller wending his way homeward after this
fashion, which is considered by evil-minded men to be symbolical of
intoxication, and is not held by such persons to denote that state of deep
wisdom and reflection in which the actor knows himself to be, began to think
that possibly he had misplaced his confidence and that the dwarf might not be
precisely the sort of person to whom to entrust a secret of such delicacy and
importance. And being led and tempted on by this remorseful thought into a
condition which the evil-minded class before referred to would term the maudlin
state or stage of drunkenness, it occurred to Mr. Swiveller to cast his hat upon
the ground, and moan, crying aloud that he was an unhappy orphan, and that if he
had not been an unhappy orphan things had never come to this.
    »Left an infant by my parents, at an early age,« said Mr. Swiveller,
bewailing his hard lot, »cast upon the world in my tenderest period, and thrown
upon the mercies of a deluding dwarf, who can wonder at my weakness! Here's a
miserable orphan for you. Here,« said Mr. Swiveller, raising his voice to a high
pitch, and looking sleepily round, »is a miserable orphan!«
    »Then,« said somebody hard by, »let me be a father to you.«
    Mr. Swiveller swayed himself to and fro to preserve his balance, and,
looking into a kind of haze which seemed to surround him, at last perceived two
eyes dimly twinkling through the mist, which he observed after a short time were
in the neighbourhood of a nose and mouth. Casting his eyes down towards that
quarter in which, with reference to a man's face, his legs are
