A long, long time ago there lived in London a young man named Clennam. He was an orphan, and was brought up by a stern uncle, who crushed and repressed his youth and finally forced him to marry a cold, unfeeling, stubborn woman whom he did not in the least love.

Some time before this marriage, the nephew had met a beautiful young woman, also an orphan, whom a rich man named Dorrit was educating to be a singer, since she had a remarkable voice. Clennam had fallen in love with her and had persuaded her to give him all her love in return. There had even been a kind of ceremony of marriage between them.

But they were both very poor and could not really marry for fear of the anger of Clennam's cruel uncle, who finally compelled his nephew to marry the other woman, whom he had picked out for him. And the singer, because she loved him and could not bear to see him made a beggar, gave him up. So Clennam married one woman while loving another, and this, as all wrong things must do, resulted in unhappiness for them both.

The singer had given him a little silk watch-paper worked in beads with the initials D. N. F. These letters stood for the words, "Do Not Forget."

The wife saw the paper with her husband's watch in his secret drawer and wondered what it meant. One day she found an old letter, that had passed between her husband and the singer, which explained the initials and betrayed the secret of their love.

She was hard and unforgiving. Though she had never loved Clennam herself, her anger was terrible. She went to the singer, and under threat of for ever disgracing her in the eyes of the world, she made her give up to her her baby boy, Arthur, to rear as her own. She promised, in return, that the little Arthur should be provided for and should never know the real history of his parentage. She also compelled her husband and the singer to take an oath that neither would ever see or communicate with the other again.

Mrs. Clennam, in taking this terrible revenge, cheated herself into believing that she was only the instrument of God, carrying out His will and punishment. But in reality she was satisfying the rage and hatred of her own heart. Year by year she nursed this rage in the gloomy house in which Clennam lived and where he carried on the London branch of his business.

It was an old brick house separated from the street by a rusty courtyard. It seemed to have once been about to slide down sidewise, but had been propped up as though it leaned on some half-dozen gigantic crutches. Inside it was dark and miserable, with sunken floors and blackened furniture. In a corner of the sitting-room was an ugly old clock that was wound once a week with an iron handle, and on the walls were pictures showing the "Plagues of Egypt." The only pleasure the grim woman enjoyed was reading aloud from those parts of the Old Testament which call for dreadful punishments to fall upon all the enemies of the righteous, and in these passages she gloried.

In this melancholy place the boy Arthur Clennam grew up in silence and in dread, wondering much why they lived so lonely and why his father and mother (for so he thought Mrs. Clennam to be) sat always so silent with faces turned from each other.

There were but two servants, an old woman named Affery, and Flintwinch, her husband, a short, bald man, who was both clerk and footman, and who carried his head awry and walked in a one-sided crab-like way, as though he were falling and needed propping up like the house. Flintwinch was cunning and without conscience. Very few secrets his mistress had which he did not know, and they often quarreled.

At length the uncle, who had compelled the unhappy marriage of Arthur's father, died. Feeling sorry at the last for the wretched singer, whose life had been ruined, he left her in his will a sum of money, and another sum to the youngest niece of the man who had befriended and educated her—Mr. Dorrit.

This money, however, Mrs. Clennam did not intend either the woman she hated or the niece of her patron should get. She hid the part of the will which referred to it, and made Flintwinch (who, beside her husband, was the only one who knew of it) promise not to tell. Arthur's father she compelled to sail to China, to take charge of the branch of his business in that country, and when Arthur was old enough, she sent him there also.

For twenty years, while Arthur stayed with his father on the other side of the world, Mrs. Clennam, cold and unforgiving as ever, lived on in the old, tumbling house, carrying on the London business with the aid of Flintwinch.

The poor, forsaken singer lost her mind and at last died. Mr. Dorrit, of course, knowing nothing about the hidden will, could not claim his share, and the guilty secret remained (except for Arthur's unhappy father) in possession of only Mrs. Clennam and the crafty Flintwinch.

So the years rolled by, and Mrs. Clennam's cold gray eyes grew colder, her gray hair grayer and her face more hard and stony. She went out less and less, and finally paralysis made her keep to her room and her chair.

The time came when Arthur's father lay dying with his son beside him. On his death-bed he did not forget the money which had never been restored. He had not strength to write, but with his dying hand he gave Arthur his watch, making him promise to take it back to England to the wife whose anger and hatred still lived. The watch still held the little paper with the bead initials that stood for "Do not forget," and he meant thus to remind her of the wrong which was still unrighted.

Many times thereafter, on his way back to London, Arthur thought of his father's strange manner and wondered if it could be that some wrong deed lay on his conscience. This idea clung to him, so that when he saw Mrs. Clennam again on his arrival, and spoke to her of his father's last hours, he asked her if she thought this might be so. But at this her anger rose; she upbraided him and declared if he ever referred again to the subject she would renounce him as her son and cast him off for ever.

It was her guilty conscience, of course, that caused this burst of rage. And yet, just because it was not for the money's sake that she had done that evil act, but because she so hated the woman to whom it should have been given, she tried to convince herself that she had acted rightly, as the instrument of God, to punish wickedness. She had told herself this falsehood over and over again so often that she had ended by quite believing it to be the truth.

Arthur said no more to her about the matter. He was a man now, and his father's death had made him master of a very considerable fortune. He decided that he would not carry on the business, but would make a new one for himself. This resolution angered Mrs. Clennam greatly, but she grimly determined to carry it on herself, and in Arthur's place took the wily Flintwinch as her partner and told Arthur coldly to go his own way.

II
THE CHILD OF THE MARSHALSEA

On the first night of his return to the house of his childhood Arthur had noticed there a little seamstress, with pale, transparent face, hazel eyes and a figure as small as a child's. She wore a spare thin dress, spoke little, and passed through the rooms noiselessly and shy. They called her "Little Dorrit." She came in the morning and sewed quietly till nightfall, when she vanished. It had been so rare in the old days for any one to please the mistress of that gloomy house that the little creature's presence there interested Arthur greatly and he longed to know something of her history.

He soon found there was nothing to be learned from Flintwinch, and so one night he followed Little Dorrit when she left the house. To his great surprise he saw her finally enter a great bare building surrounded with spiked walls and called The Marshalsea.

This was a famous prison where debtors were kept. In those days the law not only permitted a man to be put in jail for debt, but compelled him to stay there till all he owed was paid—a strange custom, since while he was in jail he was unable to earn any money to pay with. In fact, in many cases poor debtors had to stay there all their lives.

Inside the walls of the Marshalsea the wives and children of unfortunate prisoners were allowed to come to live with them just as in a boarding-house or hotel, but the debtors themselves could never pass out of the gate. Arthur entered the prison ignorant of its rules and so stayed too long, for presently the bell for closing rang, the gates were shut, and he had to stay inside all night. This was not so pleasant, but it gave him a chance easily to find out all he wished to learn of Little Dorrit's history.

Her father, before she was born, had lost all his money through a business failure, and had thus been thrown into the Marshalsea. There Amy, or Little Dorrit, as they came to call her, was born; there her mother had languished away, and there she herself had always lived, mothering her pretty frivolous sister Fanny, and her lazy, ne'er-do-well brother, "Tip."

Her father had been an inmate of the prison so many years that he was called "The Father of the Marshalsea." From being a haughty man of wealth, he had become a shabby old white-haired dignitary with a soft manner, who took little gifts of money which any one gave him half-shame-facedly and to the mortification of Little Dorrit alone.

The child had grown up the favorite of the turnkeys and of all the prison, calling the high, blank walls "home." When she was a little slip of a girl she had her sister and brother sent to night-school for a time, and later taught herself fine sewing, so that at the time Arthur Clennam returned to London she was working every day outside the walls, for small wages. Each night she returned to the prison to prepare her father's supper, bringing him whatever she could hide from her own dinner at the house where she sewed, loving him devotedly through all.

She even had a would-be lover, too. The son of one of the turnkeys, a young man with weak legs and weak, light hair, soft-hearted and soft-headed, had long pursued her in vain. He was now engaged in seeking comfort for his hopeless love by composing epitaphs for his own tombstone, such as:

Old Mr. Dorrit held his position among the Marshalsea prisoners with great fancied dignity and received all visitors and new-comers in his room like a man of society at home. During that evening Arthur called on him and treated the old man so courteously and talked to Little Dorrit with such kindness that she began to love him from that moment.

Many things of Little Dorrit's pathetic story Arthur learned that night. His first surprise at finding her in the Clennam house mingled strangely with his old thought that his father on his death-bed seemed to be troubled by some remorseful memory; and as he slept in the gloomy prison he dreamed that the little seamstress was in some mysterious way mingled with this wrong and remorse.

There was more truth than fancy in this dream. Not knowing the true history of his parentage, and wholly ignorant of the sad life and death of the poor singer, his own unhappy mother, Arthur had never heard the name Dorrit. He did not know, to be sure, that it was the name of the wealthy patron who had once educated her. As a matter of fact, this patron had been Little Dorrit's own uncle, who now was living in poverty. It was to his youngest niece that the will Mrs. Clennam had wickedly hidden declared the money should go. And as Little Dorrit was this niece, it rightfully belonged to her. The real reason of Mrs. Clennam's apparent kindness to Little Dorrit was the pricking of her conscience, which gave her no rest.

But all this Arthur could not guess. Nevertheless, he had gained such an interest in the little seamstress that next day he determined to find out all he could about her father's unfortunate affairs.

He had great difficulty in this. The Government had taken charge of old Mr. Dorrit's debts, and his affairs were in the hands of a department which some people sneeringly called the "Circumlocution Office"—because it took so much time and talk for it to accomplish anything. This department had a great many clerks, every one of whom seemed to have nothing to do but to keep people from troubling them by finding out anything.

Arthur went to one clerk, who sent him to a Mr. Tite Barnacle, a fat, pompous man with a big collar, a big watch chain and stiff boots. Mr. Barnacle treated him quite as an outsider and would give him no information whatever. Then he tried another department, where they said they knew nothing of the matter. Still a third advised him not to bother about it. So at last he had to give up, quite discouraged.

Though he could do nothing for Little Dorrit's father, Arthur did what he could for her lazy brother. He paid his debts so that he was released from the Marshalsea, and this kindness, though Tip himself was ungrateful to the last degree, endeared him still more to Little Dorrit, who needed his friendship so greatly.

The night her brother was released she came to Arthur to thank him—alone save for a half-witted woman named Maggie, who believed she herself was only ten years old, and called Little Dorrit "Little Mother," and who used to go with her when she went through the streets at night. Little Dorrit was dressed so thinly and looked so slight and helpless that when she left, Arthur felt as if he would like to take her up in his arms and carry her home again.

It would have been better if he had. For when they got back to the Marshalsea the prison gates had closed for the night and they had to stay out till morning. They wandered in the cold street till nearly dawn; then a kind-hearted sexton who was opening a church let them come in and made Little Dorrit a bed of pew cushions, and there she slept a while with a big church-book for a pillow. Arthur did not know of this adventure till long afterward, for Little Dorrit would not tell him for fear he should blame himself for letting them go home alone.

Little Dorrit had one other valuable friend beside Arthur at this time. This was a rent collector named Pancks, who was really kind-hearted, but who was compelled to squeeze rent money out of the poor by his master. The latter looked so good and benevolent that people called him "The Patriarch," but he was at heart a genuine skinflint, for whose meanness Pancks got all the credit. Pancks was a short, wiry man, with a scrubby chin and jet-black eyes, and when he walked or talked he puffed and blew and snorted like a little steam-engine.

Little Dorrit used sometimes to go to sew at the house of "The Patriarch," and Pancks often saw her there. One day he greatly surprised her by asking to see the palm of her hand, and then he pretended to read her fortune. He told her all about herself (which astonished her, for she did not know that he knew anything of her history), and then, with many mysterious puffs and winks, he told her she would finally be happy. After that she seemed to meet Pancks wherever she went—at Mrs. Clennam's and at the Marshalsea as well—but at such meetings he would pretend not to know her. Only sometimes, when no one else was near, he would whisper:

"I'm Pancks, the gipsy—fortune-telling."

These strange actions puzzled Little Dorrit very much. But she was far from guessing the truth: that Pancks had for some time been interested (as had Arthur Clennam) in finding out how her father's affairs stood. He had discovered thus, accidentally, that old Mr. Dorrit was probably the heir at law to a great estate that had lain for years forgotten, unclaimed and growing larger all the time. The question now was to prove this, and this, Pancks, out of friendship for Little Dorrit, was busily trying to do.

One day the rent-collector came to Arthur to tell him that he had succeeded. The proof was all found. Mr. Dorrit's right was clear; all he had to do was to sign his name to a paper, and the Marshalsea gates would open and he would be free and a rich man.

Arthur found Little Dorrit and told her the glad tidings. They made her almost faint for joy, although all her rejoicing was for her father. Then he put her in a carriage and drove as fast as possible with her to the prison to carry her father the great news.

Little Dorrit told the old man with her arms around his neck, and as she clasped him, thinking that she had never yet in her life known him as he had once been, before his prison years, she cried:

"I shall see him as I never saw him yet—my dear love, with the dark cloud cleared away! I shall see him, as my poor mother saw him long ago! O my dear, my dear! O father, father! O thank God, thank God!"

So "The Father of the Marshalsea" left the old prison, in which he had lived so long, and all the prisoners held a mass-meeting and gave him a farewell address and a dinner.

On the last day, when they drove away from the iron gates, old Mr. Dorrit was in fine, new clothing, and Tip and Fanny were clad in the height of fashion. Poor Little Dorrit, in joy for her father and grief at parting from Arthur (for they were to go abroad at once), did not appear at the last moment, and Arthur, who had come to see them off, hastening to her room, found that she had fainted away. He carried her gently down to the carriage, and as he lifted her in, he saw she had put on the same thin little dress that she had worn on the day he had first seen her.

So, amid cheers and good wishes, they drove away, and Arthur, as he walked back through the crowded streets, somehow felt very lonely.

III
WHAT RICHES BROUGHT TO THE DORRITS

Great changes came to old Mr. Dorrit with his money. As they traveled slowly through Switzerland and into Italy, he put on greater dignity daily. He lived each day suspecting that every one was in some way trying to slight him and grew very much ashamed of his past years in the Marshalsea, and forbade all mention of them. He hired a great number of servants, and, to improve the manners of Fanny and Little Dorrit, he employed a woman named Mrs. General, who had many silly notions of society.

Little Dorrit could not even say "father" without being reproved by Mrs. General. "Papa is preferable, my dear," the lady would insist, "and, besides, it gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms are all good words for the lips. You will find it serviceable in the formation of a demeanor, if you say to yourself in company—on entering a room, for instance—'Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms!'"

Fanny and Tip were as spoiled as possible. Fanny, morning and night, thought of nothing but wearing costly dresses and "going into society," and Tip did little but play cards and bet on horse-races. Only Little Dorrit, through all, kept her old sweet self unchanged.

Wherever they went they lived in splendid hotels. In Venice the palace they occupied was six times as big as the whole Marshalsea. Mr. Dorrit, when he remembered Arthur Clennam at all, spoke of him as an upstart who had intruded his presence upon them in their poverty, and quickly forgot all his kindness and his efforts to help and comfort them.

But Little Dorrit never forgot. Her present existence seemed a dream. She tried to care for her father as she used to do, but he was afraid people would think he had not been used to servants (foolish man!) so she lost even the little pleasure of her old prison life in the Marshalsea. There were valets and maids now to do all the little things she had once loved to do with her own hands, and she seemed to be no longer of use to him. She loved her father as dearly as she always had, but now she had begun to feel that she could never see him as he used to be before his prison days, because first poverty and now wealth had changed him. The old sad shadow came over her. He grew angry at her and chid her, and hurt her. It seemed he had entirely forgotten the old days when she slaved so for him.

Poor little Dorrit! She was far lonelier now than she had ever been before in the debtors' prison—lonelier and unhappier than Arthur Clennam in London could have guessed. The gay, fashionable life of her brother and sister did not attract her. She was timid of joining in their gaieties. She asked leave only to be left alone, and went about the city in a gondola in a quiet, scared, lost manner. It often seemed to her as if the Marshalsea must be just behind the next big building, or Mrs. Clennam's house, where she had first met Arthur, just around the next corner. And she used to look into gondolas as they passed, as if she might see Arthur any minute.

In the days of their prison-poverty Fanny had occasionally earned some money by dancing at a theater. There she had met a silly, chuckle-headed young man, the son of a Mrs. Merdle, and he had been fascinated by her beauty. Now, in their wealth, he saw Fanny again and fell even more deeply in love with her. Mrs. Merdle was a cold-hearted, artificial woman, who kept a parrot that was always shrieking, and who thought of nothing but riches and society. She would have refused to let her son marry Fanny in the old days, but now it was another matter. He proposed, and Fanny, who had been made angry a thousand times by Mrs. Merdle's insolence and patronizing ways, made up her mind to marry him if only to take her revenge on his mother.

Mrs. Merdle's husband always stayed in London. He was immensely rich—so rich that people said everything he touched turned into gold. He was a quiet, dull man, with dull red cheeks, and cared nothing at all for society, though everybody flattered and courted him.

When old Mr. Dorrit saw Mrs. Merdle's son was in love with Fanny he was greatly pleased. He had by this time grown so selfish that he considered much less her happiness than his own profit, and he thought if they were married he could persuade Mr. Merdle to invest his own great fortune for him, so that he would be even richer than he was now. Mr. Merdle's name had been growing bigger and bigger every day. Nobody believed the great man could make a mistake, but that he was going to keep on getting richer and richer (though nobody knew how he did it) as long as he lived.

So, before long, Fanny married Mrs. Merdle's son, and went back to London to take up life in the magnificent Merdle mansion with her silly, chuckle-headed husband. Mr. Merdle had got a very rich position for him in the "Circumlocution Office" with which Arthur Clennam had had so much trouble once on a time.

Old Mr. Dorrit went to London, too, and, as he had schemed, gave the famous Mr. Merdle all his fortune to invest. Then he returned to Italy, where, in Rome, his faithful and lonely Little Dorrit waited lovingly for him.

On the night after he reached Rome Mrs. Merdle gave a dinner party to a large company, and Little Dorrit and her father attended.

In the midst of the dinner he suddenly called to her across the table. His voice was so loud and excited that all the guests were frightened and rose to their feet. Little Dorrit ran to him and put her arms about him, for she saw at once that he was not himself.

He began to address the company, and his first words showed that his mind had failed. He imagined he was still in the debtors' prison and that all the rich people about him were the other poor prisoners. He made them a speech, welcoming them to its walls, thanking them in advance for any money they might give to him as "The Father of the Marshalsea." And he ended by calling for the old turnkey he had known there to help him up the narrow stair to bed, as he had been used to do in the prison.

Little Dorrit was not ashamed—she loved him too much for that. Her only wish was to soothe him, and with a pale, frightened face, she begged him to come with her.

They got him away at last and carried him to his house. Once laid on his bed, he never rose from it again. Nor did he regain his memory of the immediate present. That, with its show and its servants, its riches and power, in which Little Dorrit had had so small a part, had faded out for ever, and now his mind, back in the Marshalsea, recognized his daughter as his only stay and faithful comfort.

It was well so, for this was the father she had most loved.

So she watched beside him day and night, while every day his life grew weaker and weaker. Every day the shadow of death stole deeper and deeper over his face, until one morning, when the dawn came, they saw that he would never wake again.

IV
WHAT HAPPENED TO ARTHUR CLENNAM

Arthur, meanwhile, had missed Little Dorrit greatly. He was very friendly with a couple named Meagles—a comely, healthy, good-humored and kind-hearted pair, and he was so lonely he almost thought himself in love with their daughter "Pet" for a while. But Pet soon married a portrait-painter and went to live abroad.

Mr. and Mrs. Meagles had a little orphan maid whom they called "Tattycoram," for no particular reason except that her first name had been Hattie, and the name of the man who founded the asylum where they found her was "Coram." Tattycoram had a very bad temper, so that Mr. Meagles, when he saw one of these fits coming on, used to stop and say, "Count twenty-five, Tattycoram." And Tattycoram would count twenty-five, and by that time the fit of temper was over.

But one day she had an attack that was very much worse than usual—so much worse that she couldn't wait to count twenty-five, and ran away. And it was a long time before they saw Tattycoram again.

At Mr. Meagles's house Arthur met an inventor named Doyce, a quiet, straightforward man, whom he soon came to like. Doyce had made a useful invention and for twelve years had been trying to bring it to the notice of the British Government. But this matter, too, had to go through the famous "Circumlocution Office," and so there it had stuck just as Arthur's inquiry had done.

Arthur having chosen no new business as yet, before long proposed a partnership between himself and Doyce. The latter agreed readily, and the new firm was established. Soon after this Doyce went abroad on business, leaving Arthur to manage the affairs.

All might have gone well but for the fame of Mr. Merdle. His wealth seemed so enormous, and his plans so sure, that many people throughout England, just as old Mr. Dorrit had done, put their money in his care. Even Pancks, the rent collector, did so, and strongly advised Arthur to do the same. Convinced by such advice Arthur was unhappily led to invest the money of the new firm in Merdle's schemes.

One day soon after, Mr. Merdle, whom every one had looked up to and respected, killed himself, and then to every one's astonishment it was found that his money was all gone, that his schemes were all exploded, and that the famous man who had dined and wined with the great was simply the greatest forger and the greatest thief that had ever cheated the gallows.

But it was too late then. Arthur's firm was utterly ruined with all the rest. What hurt him most was the knowledge that by using the firm's money he had ruined his honest partner, Doyce.

In order to set the latter as near right as he could, Arthur turned over every cent of his own personal fortune to pay as much of the firm's debt as it would, keeping nothing of value but his clothes and his books. Beside doing this, he wrote out a statement, declaring that he, Arthur Clennam, had of his own act and against his partner's express caution, used the firm's money for this purpose, and that he alone, and not Doyce, was to blame. He declared also that his own share (if any remained out of the wreck) should go to his partner, and that he himself would work as a mere clerk, at as small a salary as he could live on.

He published this statement at once, unwisely no doubt, when all London was so enraged against Merdle and glad to have some one on whom to vent its madness. In the public anger and excitement the generosity of his act was lost sight of. A few hours later a man who had invested some of his money in Arthur's firm, and thus lost it, had him arrested for debt, and that night he entered the dismal iron gates of the Marshalsea prison, not now as a visitor, but as one whom the pitiless bars locked in from liberty.

The turnkey took him up the old familiar staircase and into the old familiar room in which he had so often been. And as he sat down in its loneliness, thinking of the fair, slight form that had dwelt in it so long, he turned his face to the wall and sobbed aloud, "Oh, my Little Dorrit!"

Wherever he looked he seemed to see her, and just as she herself in a foreign country found herself looking and listening for his step and voice, so, too, it was with him.

In the days that followed he thought of her all the while. He was too depressed and too retiring and unhappy to mingle with the other prisoners, so he kept his own room and made no friends. The rest disliked him and said he was proud or sullen.

A burning, reckless mood soon added its sufferings to his dread and hatred of the place. The thought grew on him that he would in the end break his heart and die there. He felt that he was being stifled, and at times the longing to be free made him believe he must go mad. A week of this suffering found him in his bed in the grasp of a slow, wasting fever. He felt light-headed and delirious, and heard tunes playing that he knew were only in his brain.

One day when he had dragged himself to his chair by the window, the door of his room seemed to open to a quiet figure, which dropped a mantle it wore; then it seemed to be Little Dorrit in her old dress, and it seemed first to smile and then to burst into tears.

He roused himself, and all at once he saw that it was no dream. She was really there, kneeling by him now with her tears falling on his hands and her voice crying, "Oh, my best friend! Don't let me see you weep! I am your own poor child come back!"

No one had told her he was ill, for she had just returned from Italy. She made the room fresh and neat, sewed a white curtain for its window, and sent out for grapes, roast chicken and jellies, and every good thing. She sat by him all day, smoothing his hot pillow or giving him a cooling drink.

Though he had been strangely blind, he knew at last that she must have loved him all along. And to find her great heart turned to him thus in his misfortune made him realize that during all those months in the lonely prison he had been loving her, too, though he had not known it.

A feeling of peace came to him. Whenever he opened his eyes he saw her at his side—the same trusting Little Dorrit that he had always known.

V
"ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL"

All the while these things were happening, Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch had continued their grim partnership.

Mrs. Clennam at last decided to burn the part of the will she had hidden, so that her share in the wicked plan could never be found out. Flintwinch, however, wishing for his own purposes to keep her in his power, deceived her. He cunningly put in its place a worthless piece of paper, and this Mrs. Clennam burned instead. Flintwinch then locked up the real piece in an iron box, with a lot of private letters that had been written by the poor crazed singer to Mrs. Clennam, begging her forgiveness. The box he gave to his brother, who took it to Holland with him for safe-keeping.

But Flintwinch, in this deception, overreached himself.

There was an adventurer in Holland named Rigaud, who used to drink and smoke with this brother. He was an oily villain, who had been in jail in France on suspicion of having murdered his wife. He had shaggy dry hair streaked with red, and a thick mustache, and when he smiled his eyes went close together, his mustache went up under his hooked nose, and his nose came down over his mustache. Rigaud saw the box, concluded it contained something valuable, and made up his mind to get it. His chance came when the brother of Flintwinch died suddenly one day, and he lost no time in making away with the iron box.

By means of the letters it contained, he soon guessed the secret which Mrs. Clennam had been for so many years at such pains to conceal, and, deciding that by this knowledge he could squeeze money out of her, he came to London to find and threaten her.

But she, believing she had burned the part of the will which Rigaud claimed to possess, refused to listen to him, until at last, maddened by her refusals, he searched out the Dorrits.

He soon discovered that the man who had educated the singer (Arthur's real mother) was Frederick Dorrit, Little Dorrit's dead uncle, and that it was Little Dorrit herself, since she was his youngest niece, from whom the money was now being unjustly kept.

Rigaud easily found Little Dorrit, for she was now in the Marshalsea nursing Arthur, where he lay sick, and to her the cunning adventurer sent a copy of the paper in a sealed packet, asking her, if it was not reclaimed before the prison closed that same night, to open and read it herself.

He then went to the Clennam house, told Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch what he had done and demanded money at once as the price of his reclaiming the packet before Little Dorrit should learn the secret it held.

At this Flintwinch had to confess what he had done, and Mrs. Clennam knew that the fatal paper had not been burned, after all.

The wretched woman, seeing this sharp end to all her scheming, was almost distracted. She had not walked a step for twelve years, but now her excitement and frenzy gave her unnatural strength. She rose from her invalid chair and ran with all her speed from the house. Old Affery, the servant, followed her mistress, wringing her hands as she tried vainly to overtake her.

Mrs. Clennam did not pause till she had reached the prison and found Little Dorrit. She told her to open the packet at once and to read what it contained, and then, kneeling at her feet, she promised to restore to her all she had withheld, and begged her to forgive and to come back with her to tell Rigaud that she already knew the secret and that he might do his worst.

Little Dorrit was greatly moved to see the stern, gray-haired woman at her feet. She raised and comforted her, assuring her that, come what would, Arthur should never learn the truth from her lips. This return of good for evil from the one she had most injured brought the tears to the hard woman's eyes. "God bless you," she said in a broken voice.

Side by side they hastened back to the Clennam house, but as they reached the entrance of its dark courtyard there came a sudden noise like thunder. For one instant they saw the building, with the insolent Rigaud waiting smoking in the window; then the walls heaved, surged outward, opened and fell into pieces. Its great pile of chimneys rocked, broke and tumbled on the fragments, and only a huge mass of timbers and stone, with a cloud of dust hovering over it, marked the spot where it had stood.

The rotten old building, propped up so long, had fallen at last. For years old Affery had insisted that the house was haunted. She had often heard mysterious rustlings and noises, and in the mornings sometimes she would find little heaps of dust on the floors. Curious, crooked cracks would appear, too, in the walls, and the doors would stick with no apparent reason. These things, of course, had been caused by the gradual settling of the crazy walls and timbers, which now finally had collapsed all at once.

Frightened, they ran back to the street and there Mrs. Clennam's strange strength left her, and she fell in a heap upon the pavement.

She never from that hour was able to speak a word or move a finger. She lived for three years in a wheel-chair, but she lived—and died—like a statue.

For two days workmen dug industriously in the ruins before they found the body of Rigaud, with his head smashed to atoms beneath a huge beam.

They dug longer than that for the body of Flintwinch, and stopped at last when they came to the conclusion that he was not there. By that time, however, he had had a chance to get together all of the firm's money he could lay his hands on and to decamp. He was never seen again in England, but travelers claimed to have seen him in Holland, where he lived comfortably under the name of "Mynheer Von Flyntevynge"—which is, after all, about as near as one can come to saying "Flintwinch" in Dutch.

No one grieved greatly over his loss. It was long before Arthur knew of these events, and Little Dorrit was too happy in nursing him back to health to think much about it.

She was not content with this, either, but wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, who were abroad, of the sick man's misfortune. The former went at once in search of Doyce and brought him back to London, where together they set the firm of "Doyce and Clennam" on its feet again and arranged to buy Arthur's liberty. They did not tell Arthur anything of this, however, in order that they might surprise him.

Mr. Meagles, for Little Dorrit's sake, tried hard to find the fragment of the will which Rigaud had kept in the iron box. But it was Tattycoram, the little maid with the bad temper, who finally found it in a lodging Rigaud had occupied, and brought it to Mr. Meagles, praying on her knees that he take her back into his service, which, to be sure, he was very glad to do.

Arthur, while he was slowly growing better, had thought much of his condition. Though Little Dorrit had begged him again and again to take her money and use it as his own, he had refused, telling her as gently as he could that now that she was rich and he a ruined man, this could never be, and that, as the time had long gone by when she and the Marshalsea had anything in common, they two must soon part.

One day, however, when he was well enough to sit up, Little Dorrit came to his room in the prison and told him she had received a very great fortune and asked him again if he would not take it.

"Never," he told her.

"You will not take even half of it?" she asked pleadingly.

"Never, dear Little Dorrit!" he said emphatically.

Then, at last, she laid her face on his breast crying:

"I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here in the Marshalsea. I have just found that papa gave all we had to Mr. Merdle and it is swept away with the rest. My great fortune now is poverty, because it is all you will take. Oh, my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?"

He had locked her in his arms, and his tears were falling on her cheek as she said joyfully:

"I never was rich before, or proud, or happy. I would rather pass my life here in prison with you, and work daily for my bread, than to have the greatest fortune that ever was told and be the greatest lady that ever was honored!"

But Arthur's prison life was to be short. For Mr. Meagles and Doyce burst upon them with all the other good news at once. Arthur was free, the firm had been reËstablished with him at its head, and to-morrow the debtors' prison would be only a memory.

Next morning, before they left the Marshalsea for ever, Little Dorrit handed Arthur a folded paper, and asked him to please her by putting it into the fire with his own hand.

"Is it a charm?" he asked.

"It is anything you like best," she answered, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. "Only say 'I love you' as you do it!"

He said it, and the paper burned away. And so the will that had been the cause of so much pain and wrong was turned to ashes. Little Dorrit kept the promise she had made, and Arthur never learned of the sin of which the woman he had always called his mother had been guilty.

Then, when all good-bys had been said, they walked together to the very same church where Little Dorrit had slept on the cushions the night she had been locked out of the Marshalsea, and there she and Arthur were married. Doyce gave the bride away.

And among the many who came to witness the wedding were not only Pancks, and Maggie, the half-witted woman, but even a group of Little Dorrit's old turnkey friends from the prison—among whom was the disconsolate Chivery, who had so long solaced himself by composing epitaphs for his own tombstone, and who went home to meditate over his last inscription:

STRANGER! Respect the Tomb of
JOHN CHIVERY, JUNIOR
Who Died at an Advanced Age not Necessary to
Mention. He Encountered His Rival and
Felt Inclined
To Have a Round with Him;
But, for the Sake of the Loved One, Conquered
Those Feelings of Bitterness and Became
MAGNANIMOUS