'Poor child!' 'Dear grandfather,' cried the girl with an energy which shone in her flushed face, trembling voice, and impassioned gesture, 'I am not a child in that I think, but even if I am, oh hear me pray that we may beg, or work in open roads or fields, to earn a scanty living, rather than live as we do now.' 'Nelly!' said the old man.
'Yes, yes, rather than live as we do now,' the child repeated, more earnestly than before.

'If you are sorrowful, let me know why and be sorrowful too; if you waste away and are paler and weaker every day, let me be your nurse and try to comfort you.

If you are poor, let us be poor together; but let me be with you, do let me be with you; do not let me see such change and not know why, or I shall break my heart and die.

Dear grandfather, let us leave this sad place to-morrow, and beg our way from door to door.' The old man covered his face with his hands, and hid it in the pillow of the couch on which he lay.
'Let us be beggars,' said the child passing an arm round his neck, 'I have no fear but we shall have enough, I am sure we shall.

Let us walk through country places, and sleep in fields and under trees, and never think of money again, or anything that can make you sad, but rest at nights, and have the sun and wind upon our faces in the day, and thank God together! Let us never set foot in dark rooms or melancholy houses, any more, but wander up and down wherever we like to go; and when you are tired, you shall stop to rest in the pleasantest place that we can find, and I will go and beg for both.' The child's voice was lost in sobs as she dropped upon the old man's neck; nor did she weep alone.
These were not words for other ears, nor was it a scene for other eyes.
And yet other ears and eyes were there and greedily taking in all that passed, and moreover they were the ears and eyes of no less a person than Mr Daniel Quilp, who, having entered unseen when the child first placed herself at the old man's side, refrained--actuated, no doubt, by motives of the purest delicacy--from interrupting the conversation, and stood looking on with his accustomed grin.