“This must be a strange sight to you,” said Carton, with a laugh.

“I hardly seem yet,” returned Darnay, “to belong to this world again.”

“Then why the devil don’t you dine?”

He led him to a tavern, where Darnay recruited his strength with a good, plain dinner.  Carton drank, but ate nothing.

“Now your dinner is done,” Carton presently said, “why don’t you give your toast?”

“What toast?”

“Why, it’s on the tip of your tongue.”

“Miss Manette, then!”

Carton drank the toast, and flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it shivered in pieces.

After Darnay had gone, Carton drank and slept till ten o’clock, and then walked to the chambers of Mr. Stryver.  Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a bold, and was fast shouldering his way to a lucrative practice; but it had been noted that he had not the striking and necessary faculty of extracting evidence from a heap of statements.  A remarkable improvement, however, came upon him as to this.  Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was his great ally.  What the two drank together would have floated a king’s ship.

Stryver never had a case in hand but what Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling.  At last it began to get about that, although Sydney Carton would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he rendered service to Stryver in that humble capacity.  Folding wet towels on his head in a manner hideous to behold, the jackal began the “boiling down” of cases, while Stryver reclined before the fire.  Each had bottles and glasses ready to his hand.  The work was not done until the clocks were striking three.

Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, Carton threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed.  Sadly, sadly the sun rose.  It rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight upon him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

III.—­The Loadstone Rock

“Dear Dr. Manette,” said Charles Darnay, “I love your daughter fondly, devotedly.  If ever there were love in the world, I love her!”

Dr. Manette turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him or raise his eyes.

“Have you spoken to Lucie?” he asked.

“No.”

The doctor looked up; a struggle was evidently in his face—­a struggle with that look he still sometimes wore, with a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.

“If Lucie should ever tell me,” he said, “that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you.”

“Your confidence in me,” answered Darnay, relieved, “ought to be returned with full confidence on my part.  I am, as you know, like yourself, a voluntary exile from France.  The name I bear at present is not my own.  I wish to tell you what that is, and why I am in England.”