“Ha! ha!” cried Fagin, extending his right hand, and turning to Mr. Bolter in a fit of chuckling which shook him as though he had the palsy; “see what a pride they take in their profession, my dear. Ain’t it beautiful?”
But perhaps she would recoil from a plot to take the life of Sikes, and that was one of the chief ends to be attained. “How,” thought Fagin, as he crept homeward, “can I increase my influence with her? what new power can I acquire?”
Fagin sat watching in his old lair, with face so distorted and pale, and eyes so red and bloodshot, that he looked less like a man, than like some hideous phantom, moist from the grave, and worried by an evil spirit.
“Then spare my life for the love of Heaven, as I spared yours,” rejoined the girl, clinging to him. “Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me.”
For now, a vision came before him, as constant and more terrible than that from which he had escaped. Those widely staring eyes, so lustreless and so glassy . . . appeared in the midst of the darkness; light in themselves, but giving light to nothing. There were but two, but they were everywhere.
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