"Never, dear Little Dorrit!" he said emphatically.
Then, at last, she laid her face on his breast crying:
"I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here in the Marshalsea. I have just found that papa gave all we had to Mr. Merdle and it is swept away with the rest. My great fortune now is poverty, because it is all you will take. Oh, my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?"
He had locked her in his arms, and his tears were falling on her cheek as she said joyfully:
"I never was rich before, or proud, or happy. I would rather pass my life here in prison with you, and work daily for my bread, than to have the greatest fortune that ever was told and be the greatest lady that ever was honored!"
But Arthur's prison life was to be short. For Mr. Meagles and Doyce burst upon them with all the other good news at once. Arthur was free, the firm had been reëstablished with him at its head, and to-morrow the debtors' prison would be only a memory.
Next morning, before they left the Marshalsea for ever, Little Dorrit handed Arthur a folded paper, and asked him to please her by putting it into the fire with his own hand.
"Is it a charm?" he asked.
"It is anything you like best," she answered, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. "Only say 'I love you' as you do it!"
He said it, and the paper burned away. And so the will that had been the cause of so much pain and wrong was turned to ashes. Little Dorrit kept the promise she had made, and Arthur never learned of the sin of which the woman he had always called his mother had been guilty.