It was her guilty conscience, of course, that caused this burst of rage. And yet, just because it was not for the money's sake that she had done that evil act, but because she so hated the woman to whom it should have been given, she tried to convince herself that she had acted rightly, as the instrument of God, to punish wickedness. She had told herself this falsehood over and over again so often that she had ended by quite believing it to be the truth.

Arthur said no more to her about the matter. He was a man now, and his father's death had made him master of a very considerable fortune. He decided that he would not carry on the business, but would make a new one for himself. This resolution angered Mrs. Clennam greatly, but she grimly determined to carry it on herself, and in Arthur's place took the wily Flintwinch as her partner and told Arthur coldly to go his own way.

II
THE CHILD OF THE MARSHALSEA

On the first night of his return to the house of his childhood Arthur had noticed there a little seamstress, with pale, transparent face, hazel eyes and a figure as small as a child's. She wore a spare thin dress, spoke little, and passed through the rooms noiselessly and shy. They called her "Little Dorrit." She came in the morning and sewed quietly till nightfall, when she vanished. It had been so rare in the old days for any one to please the mistress of that gloomy house that the little creature's presence there interested Arthur greatly and he longed to know something of her history.

He soon found there was nothing to be learned from Flintwinch, and so one night he followed Little Dorrit when she left the house. To his great surprise he saw her finally enter a great bare building surrounded with spiked walls and called The Marshalsea.

This was a famous prison where debtors were kept. In those days the law not only permitted a man to be put in jail for debt, but compelled him to stay there till all he owed was paid—a strange custom, since while he was in jail he was unable to earn any money to pay with. In fact, in many cases poor debtors had to stay there all their lives.

Inside the walls of the Marshalsea the wives and children of unfortunate prisoners were allowed to come to live with them just as in a boarding-house or hotel, but the debtors themselves could never pass out of the gate. Arthur entered the prison ignorant of its rules and so stayed too long, for presently the bell for closing rang, the gates were shut, and he had to stay inside all night. This was not so pleasant, but it gave him a chance easily to find out all he wished to learn of Little Dorrit's history.

Her father, before she was born, had lost all his money through a business failure, and had thus been thrown into the Marshalsea. There Amy, or Little Dorrit, as they came to call her, was born; there her mother had languished away, and there she herself had always lived, mothering her pretty frivolous sister Fanny, and her lazy, ne'er-do-well brother, "Tip."

Her father had been an inmate of the prison so many years that he was called "The Father of the Marshalsea." From being a haughty man of wealth, he had become a shabby old white-haired dignitary with a soft manner, who took little gifts of money which any one gave him half-shame-facedly and to the mortification of Little Dorrit alone.

The child had grown up the favorite of the turnkeys and of all the prison, calling the high, blank walls "home." When she was a little slip of a girl she had her sister and brother sent to night-school for a time, and later taught herself fine sewing, so that at the time Arthur Clennam returned to London she was working every day outside the walls, for small wages. Each night she returned to the prison to prepare her father's supper, bringing him whatever she could hide from her own dinner at the house where she sewed, loving him devotedly through all.