obligation I was conferring on my friend Mr. Charles!”
“You didn’t mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross,
“and therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”
“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 didn’t cry over, last night after
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A Tale of Two Cities
the box came, till I couldn’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 any one. 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!”
“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.
“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked
the gentleman of that name.
“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 next fortnight, while you are in
Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson’s shall go to the wall
(comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at the fortnight’s
end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on your
other fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him
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A Tale of Two Cities
to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear
Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with
an old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to
claim his own.”
For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the well-
remembered on the forehead, and then laid the bright
golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness
and delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as
Adam.
The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out with
Charles Darnay. He was so deadly pale—which had not been the
case when they went in together—that no vestige of colour was to
be seen in his face. But, in the composure of his manner he was
unaltered, except that to the shrewd glanc"};
