The prisoner followed young John up the old staircase into the old room.  “I thought you’d like the room, and here it is for you,” said young John.

Young John waited upon him; and it was young John who explained that he did this not on the ground of the prisoner’s merits, but because of the merits of another, of one who loved the prisoner.  Clennam tried to argue to himself the improbability of Little Dorrit loving him, but he wasn’t altogether successful.

He fell ill, and it was Little Dorrit whose living presence first cheered him when he returned from the world of feverish dreams and shadows.

He did his best to dissuade her from coming.  He was a ruined man, and the time when Little Dorrit and the prison had anything in common had long gone by.

But still she came and often read to him.  And one day she told him that all her money had gone as his had gone, lost in the Merdle whirlpool, and that her sister Fanny’s was lost, too, in the same way.

“I have nothing in the world.  I am as poor as when I lived here.  When papa came over to England, just before his death, he confided everything he had to the same hands, and it is all swept away.  Oh, my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me?”

Locked in his arms, held to his heart, she drew the slight hand round his neck, and clasped it in its fellow-hand.

Of course, when Doyce, who was a thoroughly good fellow, and successful to boot, found out his partner’s plight, he came back and put things right, and the business was soon set going again.

And on the very day of his release, Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit went into the neighbouring church of St. George, and were married, Doyce giving the bride away.

Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone when the signing of the register was done.

They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, and then went down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed.

* * * * *

Martin Chuzzlewit

      On its monthly publication, in 1843-44, “Martin Chuzzlewit”
     was, pecuniarily, the least successful of Dickens’s serials,
     though popular as a book.  It was his first novel after his
     American tour, and the storm of resentment that had hailed the
     appearance of “American Notes,” in 1842, was intensified by
     his merciless satire of American characteristics and
     institutions in “Martin Chuzzlewit.”  Despite all adverse
     criticism, however, “Chuzzlewit” is worthy to rank with
     anything that ever came from the pen of the great Victorian
     novelist.  It is a very long story, and a very full one; the
     canvas is crowded with a gallery of typical Dickensian people. 
     Through Mrs. Gamp, Dickens dealt a death-blow to the drunken