‘You will like her better when you know how good she is,’ said Mrs Nickleby. ‘It is a great blessing to me, in my misfortunes, to have a child, who knows neither pride nor vanity, and whose bringing–up might very well have excused a little of both at first. You don’t know what it is to lose a husband, Miss Knag.’

He got up and went to the window to open it. As soon as he opened the shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for this, burst into the room. He opened the casement. The night was fresh, bright, and very still. Just before the window was a row of pollard trees, looking black on one side and with a silvery light on the other. Beneath the trees grewsome kind of lush, wet, bushy vegetation with silver-lit leaves and stems here and there. Farther back beyond the dark trees a roof glittered with dew, to the right was a leafy tree with brilliantly white trunk and branches, and above it shone the moon, nearly at its full, in a pale, almost starless, spring sky. Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the window ledge and his eyes rested on that sky.