"If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy with you." He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy without Charles, having seen him, and replied: "My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been Charles it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen on you." It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his words were in her ears, and she remembered it long afterward. | "See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand toward the moon. "I have looked at her, from my prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her, when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison walls. I have looked at her in a state so dulled and lethargic that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them." He added with a smile, but in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, "It was twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in." The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time deepened as he dwelt upon it; but there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over. "I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother's shock had killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, Lucie, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would never know his father's story; who might even live to weigh the possibility of his father's having disappeared of his own will and act. Whether it was a daughter, who would grow to be a woman." She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand. "I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as us.' perfectly forgetful of me-rather, altogether ig-wildest, never rose near the happiness that I norant of me, and unconscious of me. I have have known with you, and that we have before cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a blank." 66 My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.", "You, my own? It is out of the consolation and restoration you have brought to me that these remembrances arise and pass between us and the moon on this last night. What did I say, just now?" "She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you." "Yes. But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence have touched me in a different way-have affected me with something as like a sorrowful sense of peace as any emotion that had pain for its foundations could —I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell and leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight often, as I now see you, except that I never held her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door. But you understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?" "The figure was not; the-the-image; the fancy ?" 66 'No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued was another and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother. The other had that likeness too-as you have-but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think. I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinctions." His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running cold as he thus tried to anatomize his old condition. "In that more peaceful state I have imagined her, in the moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all." "I was that child, my father. I was not half so good, but in my love that was I." "And she showed me her children," said the Doctor of Beauvais, "and they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed any prison of the State they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I imagined that she always brought me back after showing me such things. But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees and blessed her." He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-by they went into the house. There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry; there was even to be no bridemaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it, by taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more. Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately. So the time came for him to bid Lucie goodnight, and they separated. But in the stillness of the third hour of the morning Lucie came down stairs again and stole into his room: not free from unshaped fears beforehand. All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the shadow at a distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his; then leaned over him and looked at him. Into his handsome face the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the mastery of them, even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant was not to be beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep that night. She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his sorrows deserved. Then she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once more, and went away. So the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves of the plane-tree moved upon his face as softly as her lips had moved in praying for him. CHAPTER XVIII. NINE DAYS. THE marriage day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside the closed door of the Doctor's room, where he was speaking with Charles Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross-to whom the event, through a gradual process of reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss, but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon should have been the bridegroom. "And so," said Mr. Lorry, who could not "I am that child, I hope, my father. Oh! my der, my dear, will you bless me as fervent-sufficiently admire the bride, and who had been ly to-morrow?" "Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were moving round her to take in every point of her quiet, pretty dress; "and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought you across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought what I was doing! How lightly I val ued the obligation I was conferring on my friend | sure of his manner he was unaltered, except Mr. Charles!" that, to the shrewd glance of Mr. Lorry, it disclosed some shadowy indication that the old air of avoidance and dread had very recently passed over him like a cold wind. He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down stairs to the chariot which Mr. Lorry had hired in honor of the day. The rest followed in another carriage, and soon, in a neighboring church, where no strange eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married. "You were just now; I saw you do it, and I don't wonder at it. Such a present of plate as Besides the glancing tears that shone among you have made 'em is enough to bring tears into the smiles of the little group when it was done, any body's eyes. There's not a fork or a spoon some diamonds, very bright and sparkling, in the whole chest," said Miss Pross, with emo-glanced on the bride's hand, which were newly tion, "that I didn't cry over, last night after the box came, till I couldn't see it." "I am highly gratified," said Mr. Lorry; "though, upon my honor, I had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!" "Not at all!" From Miss Pross. "You think there might not have been a Mrs. Lorry?" asked the gentleman of that released from the dark obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry's pockets. They returned home to breakfast, and all went well, and in due course the golden hair that had mingled with the poor shoemaker's white locks in the Paris garret were mingling with them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the door, at parting. It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her father cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her enfolding arms, "Take her, dear Charles! She is yours!" And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was gone. The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross were left quite alone. It was when they turned into the welcome shade of the cool old hall that Mr. Lorry observed a great change to have come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted there had struck him a poisoned blow. "Then I think," said Mr. Lorry, "that I was very unhandsomely dealt with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my pat- He had naturally repressed much, and some tern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie," draw-revulsion might have been expected in him ing his arm soothingly round her waist, "I hear when the occasion for repression was gone. them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross But it was the old scared, lost look that troubled and I, as two formal folks of business, are anx- Mr. Lorry; and through his absent manner of ious not to lose the final opportunity of saying clasping his head and drearily wandering away something to you that you wish to hear. You into his own room when they got up stairs, Mr. leave your good father, my dear, in hands as Lorry was reminded of Defarge the wine-shop earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be keeper, and the starlight ride. taken every conceivable care of; during the next fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson's shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at the fortnight's end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband on your other fortnight's trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now I hear Somebody's step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an old-fashioned bachelor blessing before Somebody comes to claim his own." For a moment he held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright, golden hair against his little brown wig with a genuine tenderness and delicacy, which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam. The door of the Doctor's room opened, and he came out with Charles Darnay. He was so deadly pale-which had not been the case when they went in together-that no vestige of color was to be seen in his face. But in the compo "I think," he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, "I think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him. I must look in at Tellson's; so I will go there at once and come back presently. Then we will take him a ride into the country, and dine there, and all will be well." It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson's than to look out of Tellson's. He was detained there two hours. When he came back, he ascended the old staircase alone, having asked no question of the servant; and going thus into the Doctor's rooms he was stopped by a low sound of knocking. "Good God!" he said, with a start. that?" "What's Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. "Oh me, oh me! All is lost!" cried she, wringing her hands. "What is to be told to Ladybird? He doesn't know me, and is making shoes!" Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the Doctor's room. The bench was turned toward the light, as it had been when he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and his head was bent down, and he was very busy. "Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!" The Doctor looked at him for a moment half inquiringly, half as if he were angry at being spoken to-and bent over his work again. He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; and his shirt was open at the throat as it used to be when he did that work; and even the old haggard, faded surface of face had come back to him. He worked hard-impatiently-as if in some sense of having been interrupted. Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was a shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying by him, and asked him what it was. "A young lady's walking shoe," he muttered, without looking up. "It ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be." "But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!" He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without pausing in his work. "You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper occupation. Think, dear friend!" Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant at a time, when he was requested to do so; but no persuasion would extract a word from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence, and words fell on him as they would have fallen on an echoless wall, or on the air. The only ray of hope that Mr. Lorry could discover was that he sometimes furtively looked up without being asked. In that there seemed a faint expression of curiosity or perplexity, as though he were trying to reconcile some doubts in his mind. Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr. Lorry, as important above all others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie; the second, that it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In conjunction with Miss Pross, he took immediate steps toward the latter precaution by giving out that the Doctor was not well, and required a few days of complete rest. In aid of the kind deception to be practiced on his daughter, Miss Pross was to write, describing his having been called away professionally, and referring to an imaginary letter of two or three hurried lines in his own hand, represented to have been addressed to her by the same post. These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry took in the hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept another course in reserve; which was to have a certain opinion that he thought the best on the Doctor's case. In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course being thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so. He therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson's for the first time in his life, and took his post by the window in the same room. He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak to him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He aban-| doned that attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always before him, as a silent protest against the delusion into which he had fallen, or was falling. He remained, therefore, in his seat near the window, reading and writing, and expressing in as many pleasant and natural little ways as he could think of, that it was a free place. Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked on, on that first day, until it was too dark to see-worked on, half an hour after Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write. When he put his tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr. Lorry rose and said to him: "Will you go out ?" He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner, looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice: "Out?" "Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?" He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But Mr. Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the dusk, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, that he was in some misty way asking himself, "Why not?" The sagacity of the man of business perceived an advantage here, and determined to hold it. Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long time before he lay down; but when he did finally lay himself down, he fell asleep. In the morning he was up betimes, and went straight to his bench and to work. On this second day Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name, and spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He returned no reply, but it was evident that he heard what was said, and that he thought about it, however confusedly. This encouraged Mr. Lorry to have Miss Pross in with her work several times during the day; at those times they quietly spoke of Miss Lucie, and of her father then present, precisely in the usual manner, and as if there were nothing amiss. This was done without any demonstrative accompaniment, not long enough or often enough to harass him; and it lightened Mr. Lorry's friendly heart to believe that he looked up oftener, and that he appeared to be stirred by some perception of inconsistencies surrounding him. When it fell dark again Mr. Lorry asked him, as before: "Dear Doctor, will you go out?" This time Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer from him, and after remaining absent for an hour returned. In the mean while the Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had sat there looking down at the plane-tree; but on Mr. Lorry's return he slipped away to his bench. The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry's hope darkened, and his heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day. The third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six days, seven days, eight days, nine days. With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret was well kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but he could not fail to observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first, was growing dreadfully skillful, and that he had never been so intent on his work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert as in the dusk of the ninth evening. CHAPTER XIX. AN OPINION. WORN out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the tenth morning of his suspense he was startled by the shining of the sun into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark night. He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had done so, whether he was not still asleep. For going to the door of the Doctor's room and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker's bench and tools were put aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat reading at the window. He was in his usual morning dress, and his face (which Mr. Lorry could distinctly see), though still very pale, was calmly studious and attentive. 1 he, Jarvis Lorry, there? How came he to have fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in Doctor Manette's consulting-room, and to be debating these points outside the Doctor's bedroom door in the early morning? Within a few minutes Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he had had any particle of doubt left her talk would of necessity have resolved it; but he was by that time clearheaded, and had none. He advised that they should let the time go by until the regular breakfast-hour, and should then meet the Doctor as if nothing unusual had occurred. If he appeared to be in his customary state of mind, Mr. Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek direction and guidance from the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so anxious to obtain. Miss Pross submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked out with care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical toilet, Mr. Lorry presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his usual white linen, and with his usual neat leg. The Doctor was summoned in the usual way, and came to breakfast. So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping those delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt to be the only safe advance, he at first supposed that his daughter's marriage had taken place yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown out, to the day of the week and the day of the month, set him thinking and counting, and evidently made him uneasy. In all other respects, however, he was so composedly himself that Mr. Lorry determined to have the aid he sought. And that aid was his own. Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and the Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly: 66 'My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence, on a very curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say, it is very curious to me-perhaps to your better information it may be less so.' Glancing at his hands, which were discolored by his late work, the Doctor looked troubled and listened attentively. He had already glanced at his hands more than once. "Doctor Manette," said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately on the arm, "the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine. Pray give your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake-and above all, for his daughter's-his daughter's, my dear Manette." "If I understand," said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, 66 some mental shock-?" "Yes!" "Be explicit," said the Doctor. "Spare no detail." Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded. 66 Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. Lorry felt giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking My dear Manette, it is the case of an old might not be a disturbed dream of his own; for and a prolonged shock, of great acuteness and did not his eyes show him his friend before him severity, to the affections, the feelings, the-the in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and em--as you express it-the mind. The mind. It ployed as usual; and was there any sign within their range that the change of which he had so strong an impression had actually happened? It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the answer being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real corresponding and sufficient cause, how came is the case of a shock under which the sufferer was borne down, one can not say for how long, because I believe he can not calculate the time himself, and there are no other means of getting at it. It is the case of a shock from which the sufferer recovered by a process that he can not trace himself-as I once heard him publicly re |