's Inn immediately, I believe upon a little business, and I am sure he
would be very glad to accompany you, so as to prevent your going wrong again.
You had better walk in. You will very likely find my sister Merry here,« she
said, with a curious toss of her head, and anything but an agreeable smile.
    »Then, I think, I'll endeavour to find my way alone,« said Tom: »for I fear
she would not be very glad to see me. That unfortunate occurrence, in relation
to which you and I had some amicable words together, in private, is not likely
to have impressed her with any friendly feeling towards me. Though it really was
not my fault.«
    »She has never heard of that, you may depend,« said Cherry, gathering up the
corners of her mouth, and nodding at Tom. »I am far from sure that she would
bear you any mighty ill will for it, if she had.«
    »You don't say so?« cried Tom, who was really concerned by this insinuation.
    »I say nothing,« said Charity. »If I had not already known what shocking
things treachery and deceit are in themselves, Mr. Pinch, I might perhaps have
learnt it from the success they meet with - from the success they meet with.«
Here she smiled as before. »But I don't say anything. On the contrary, I should
scorn it. You had better walk in!«
    There was something hidden here, which piqued Tom's interest and troubled
his tender heart. When, in a moment's irresolution, he looked at Charity, he
could not but observe a struggle in her face between a sense of triumph and a
sense of shame; nor could he but remark how, meeting even his eyes, which she
cared so little for, she turned away her own, for all the splenetic defiance in
her manner.
    An uneasy thought entered Tom's head; a shadowy misgiving that the altered
relations between himself and Pecksniff, were somehow to involve an altered
knowledge on his part of other people, and were to give him an insight into much
of which he had had no previous suspicion. And yet he put no definite
construction upon Charity's proceedings. He certainly had no idea that as he had
been the audience and spectator of her mortification, she grasped with eager
delight at any opportunity of reproaching her sister with his presence in her
far deeper misery; for he knew nothing of it, and
