prove to be worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say in a genteel manner before he departed that he looked forward to the pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes after he had emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back.

"Can it be true," said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair, " what he has said of Ma'amselle Manette?"

66

As he has said it," returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, "it is probably false. But it may be

true.

"If it is—"Defarge began, and stopped.

"If it is ?" repeated his wife.

-And if it does come while we live to see it triumph -I hope, for her sake, destiny will keep her husband out of France."

"Her husband's destiny," said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure," will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is to end him. That is all I know."

"But it is very strange—now, at least, is it not very strange "said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it," that, after all our sympathy for monsieur her father and herself, her husband's name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that infernal dog's who has just left us?' Stranger things than that will happen when it does come," answered madame. I have them both here of a certainty, and they are both here for their merits; that is enough."

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head. Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned itself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets and courts for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to group: a missionary—there were many like her—such as the world will do well never to breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things, but the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus; if the bony fingers had been still the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

But as the fingers went the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer among every little knot of women that she had spoken with and left behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. "A great woman," said he, "a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman! Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells, and the distant beating of the military drums in the palace courtyard as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France,

should be melted into thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of power and plenty, freedom and life. So much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads.

NEVER

CHAPTER XVII

ONE NIGHT

NEVER did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in Soho than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise with a milder radiance over great London than on that night when it found them still seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.

Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.

"You are happy, my dear father?"

They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it was yet light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in both ways at his side under the tree many and many a time; but this time was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.

And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the love that heaven has so blessed—my love for Charles, and Charles's love for me. But if my

life were not to be still consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so arranged as that it would part us even by the length of a few of these streets, I should be more unhappy and self-reproachful now than I can tell you. Even as it is

Even as it was, she could not command her voice.

In the sad moonlight she clasped him by the neck and laid her face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad as the light of the sun itself is—as the light called human life is—at its coming and its going.

"Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite, quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will ever interpose between us? I know it well, but do you know it? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain?"

Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could scarcely have assumed, " Quite sure, my darling! More than that," he added, as he tenderly kissed her; "my future is far brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it could have been—nay, than it ever was—without it."

"If I could hope that, my father!—

"Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be wasted

She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated the word.

"—wasted, my child—should not be wasted, struck aside from the natural order of things—for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect while yours was incomplete ?"

"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 afterwards.

"See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards 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 dull 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 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,

८