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 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 perfectly forgetful of me—rather, altogether ignorant of me and unconscious of me. I have 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."

"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, Lucie? 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."

"So! 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 win

dow 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?" "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 anatomise 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 a 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." "I am that child, I hope, my father. Oh, my dear, my dear, will you bless me as fervently to-morrow?"

Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for loving you better than words can tell,

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and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before

us.

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 bridesmaid 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 good-night, and they separated. But in the stillness of the third hour of the morning Lucie came downstairs 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.

THE

CHAPTER XVIII

NINE DAYS

HE 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 sufficiently admire the bride, and who had been 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 valued the obligation I was conferring on my friend Mr. Charles!" You did n't mean it," remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross," and therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!"'

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Really? Well; but don't cry," said the gentle Mr. Lorry.

I am not crying," said Miss Pross; "you are." "I, my Pross?" (By this time Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant with her on occasion.)

You were just now; I saw you do it, and I don't wonder at it. Such a present of plate as you have made 'em is enough to bring tears into anybody's eyes. There's not a fork or a spoon in the collection," said Miss Pross," that I did n't cry over last night after the box came till I could n't see it."

"I am highly gratified," said Mr. Lorry, "though, upon my honour, I had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance invisible to anyone. 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!"

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Not at all!" From Miss Pross.

"You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?" asked the gentleman of that name.

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"Pooh!" rejoined Miss Pross; you were a bachelor in your cradle."

Well!" observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig," that seems probable, too."

"And you were cut out for a bachelor," pursued Miss Pross, before you were put in your cradle."

"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 pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie," drawing his arm soothingly round her waist, "I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the final opportunity of saying something to you that you wish to hear. You leave your good father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be taken every conceivable care of; during the