'That's the chap. He'll be out on Monday, and he's going to give me a berth.'
'What is he a dealer in, Tip?'
'Horses. All right! I shall do now, Amy.'
She lost sight of him for months afterwards, and only heard from him once. A whisper passed among the elder collegians that he had been seen at a mock auction in Moorfields, pretending to buy plated articles for massive silver, and paying for them with the greatest liberality in bank notes; but it never reached her ears. One evening she was alone at work--standing up at the window, to save the twilight lingering above the wall--when he opened the door and walked in.
She kissed and welcomed him; but was afraid to ask him any questions. He saw how anxious and timid she was, and appeared sorry.
'I am afraid, Amy, you'll be vexed this time. Upon my life I am!'
'I am very sorry to hear you say so, Tip. Have you come back?'
'Why--yes.'
'Not expecting this time that what you had found would answer very well, I am less surprised and sorry than I might have been, Tip.'
'Ah! But that's not the worst of it.'
'Not the worst of it?'
'Don't look so startled. No, Amy, not the worst of it. I have come back, you see; but--DON'T look so startled--I have come back in what I may call a new way. I am off the volunteer list altogether. I am in now, as one of the regulars.'
'Oh! Don't say you are a prisoner, Tip! Don't, don't!'
'Well, I don't want to say it,' he returned in a reluctant tone;'but if you can't understand me without my saying it, what am I to do? I am in for forty pound odd.'
For the first time in all those years, she sunk under her cares.
She cried, with her clasped hands lifted above her head, that it would kill their father if he ever knew it; and fell down at Tip's graceless feet.
It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to bring him to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be beside himself if he knew the truth. The thing was incomprehensible to Tip, and altogether a fanciful notion. He yielded to it in that light only, when he submitted to her entreaties, backed by those of his uncle and sister. There was no want of precedent for his return; it was accounted for to the father in the usual way; and the collegians, with a better comprehension of the pious fraud than Tip, supported it loyally.
This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls, she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates, outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them.
Worldly wise in hard and poor necessities, she was innocent in all things else. Innocent, in the mist through which she saw her father, and the prison, and the turbid living river that flowed through it and flowed on.
This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit; now going home upon a dull September evening, observed at a distance by Arthur Clennam. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit; turning at the end of London Bridge, recrossing it, going back again, passing on to Saint George's Church, turning back suddenly once more, and flitting in at the open outer gate and little court-yard of the Marshalsea.
