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. 

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