‘Ah! I should think so, deary!’ cried Mrs Boffin. ‘I should hope so! Many and many is the time I have called him by his name of John. But what’s his other name, his true other name? Give a guess, my pretty!’
‘I can’t guess,’ said Bella, turning her pale face from one to another.
‘I could,’ cried Mrs Boffin, ‘and what’s more, I did! I found him out, all in a flash as I may say, one night. Didn’t I, Noddy?’
‘Ay! That the old lady did!’ said Mr Boffin, with stout pride in the circumstance.
‘Harkee to me, deary,’ pursued Mrs Boffin, taking Bella’s hands between her own, and gently beating on them from time to time. ‘It was after a particular night when John had been disappointed—as he thought—in his affections. It was after a night when John had made an offer to a certain young lady, and the certain young lady had refused it. It was after a particular night, when he felt himself cast-away-like, and had made up his mind to go seek his fortune. It was the very next night. My Noddy wanted a paper out of his Secretary’s room, and I says to Noddy, “I am going by the door, and I’ll ask him for it.” I tapped at his door, and he didn’t hear me. I looked in, and saw him a sitting lonely by his fire, brooding over it. He chanced to look up with a pleased kind of smile in my company when he saw me, and then in a single moment every grain of the gunpowder that had been lying sprinkled thick about him ever since I first set eyes upon him as a man at the Bower, took fire! Too many a time had I seen him sitting lonely, when he was a poor child, to be pitied, heart and hand! Too many a time had I seen him in need of being brightened up with a comforting word! Too many and too many a time to be mistaken, when that glimpse of him come at last! No, no! I just makes out to cry, “I know you now! You’re John!” And he catches me as I drops.—So what,’ says Mrs Boffin, breaking off in the rush of her speech to smile most radiantly, ‘might you think by this time that your husband’s name was, dear?’
‘Not,’ returned Bella, with quivering lips; ‘not Harmon? That’s not possible?’
‘Don’t tremble. Why not possible, deary, when so many things are possible?’ demanded Mrs Boffin, in a soothing tone.
‘He was killed,’ gasped Bella.
‘Thought to be,’ said Mrs Boffin. ‘But if ever John Harmon drew the breath of life on earth, that is certainly John Harmon’s arm round your waist now, my pretty. If ever John Harmon had a wife on earth, that wife is certainly you. If ever John Harmon and his wife had a child on earth, that child is certainly this.’
By a master-stroke of secret arrangement, the inexhaustible baby here appeared at the door, suspended in mid-air by invisible agency. Mrs Boffin, plunging at it, brought it to Bella’s lap, where both Mrs and Mr Boffin (as the saying is) ‘took it out of’ the Inexhaustible in a shower of caresses. It was only this timely appearance that kept Bella from swooning. This, and her husband’s earnestness in explaining further to her how it had come to pass that he had been supposed to be slain, and had even been suspected of his own murder; also, how he had put a pious fraud upon her which had preyed upon his mind, as the time for its disclosure approached, lest she might not make full allowance for the object with which it had originated, and in which it had fully developed.