And high was her reward, when one Saturday evening, as little Paul was sitting down as usual to “resume his studies,” she sat down by his side and showed him all that was rough made smooth, and all that was so dark made clear and plain, before him. It was nothing but a startled look in Paul’s wan face—a flush—a smile—and then a close embrace; but God knows how her heart leaped up at this rich payment for her trouble.
“Oh, Floy,” cried her brother, “how I love you! How I love you, Floy!”
“And I you, dear!”
“Oh, I am sure, sure of that, Floy!”
He said no more about it, but all that evening sat close by her, very quiet; and in the night he called out from his little room within hers, three or four times, that he loved her.
There is no higher reward than that of the sympathetic teacher who for the first time lets light into a dark mind or heart.
The lady whom Florence overheard talking to her little orphaned niece about her father’s cruel coldness toward her truly said: “Not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s care.”
As Dickens was one of the first to urge that children had rights, so he was one of the first to show that there had been altogether too much thought about the duty of children to parents, and too little about the duty of parents to children. Alice Marwood, one of the characters in Dombey and Son, said to Harriet Carker:
“You brought me here by force of gentleness and kindness, and made me human by woman’s looks and words and angel’s deeds; I have felt, lying here, that I should like you to know this. It might explain, I have thought, something that used to help to harden me. I had heard so much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that I took up with the belief that duty had not been done to me, and that as the seed was sown the harvest grew.”
One other point in regard to sympathy was made in Dombey and Son, that a rough exterior may cover a sympathetic heart.