He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young wife; but when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead strongly marked. We are thoughtful to-night!" said Darnay, drawing his arm about her. "Yes, dearest Charles," with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring and attentive expression fixed upon him; "we are rather thoughtful to-night, for we have something on our mind to-night." "What is it, my Lucie ?" "Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to ask it ?" 66 Will I promise? What will I not promise to my love?" What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him! "I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and respect than you expressed for him tonight." Indeed, my own? Why so?" "That is what you are not to ask me? But I think— I know he does." "If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my life?" "I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding." "It is a painful reflection to me," said Charles Darnay, quite astounded, "that I should have done him any I never thought this of him." wrong. 66 My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be re claimed; there is scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable now. But I am sure he is capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous things." She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours. "And oh, my dearest love!" she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her hand upon his breast and raising her eyes to his, remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery! 66 The supplication touched him home. "I will always remember it, dear heart! I will remember it as long as I live." He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his and folded her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he might have cried to the night—and the words would not have parted from his lips for the first time: "God bless her for her sweet compassion! A CHAPTER XXI ECHOING FOOTSTEPS WONDERFUL corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and companion in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years. At first there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be dimmed. For there was something coming in the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts—hopes of a love as yet unknown to her; doubts of her remaining upon earth to enjoy that new delight—divided her breast. Among the echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would be left so desolate and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her eyes and broke like waves. That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then among the advancing echoes there was the tread of her tiny feet, and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her. Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband's step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes as an unruly charger, whipcorrected, snorting, and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden! Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant smile, "Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called and I must go!" those were not tears all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my Father's face. O Father, blessed words! Thus the rustling of an angel's wings got blended with the other echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie in a hushed murmur—like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore—as the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother's footstool, chattered in the tongues of the two cities that were blended in her life. The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some half-dozen times a year at most he claimed his privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening as he had once done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true echoes for ages and ages. No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him—an instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in such a case no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. at the last. 66 The little boy had spoken of him almost Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law like some great engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in his wake like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so Sydney had a swamped life of it. But easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion's jackal than any real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them but the straight hair of their dumpling heads. These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie's husband, delicately saying: Halloa! here are three lumps of bread and cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay! The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread and cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride of beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to "catch" him, and on the diamondcut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him "not to be caught." Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by saying that he had told it so often that he believed it himself— |