In his pride--for he was proud yet--he let the world go from him freely. As it fell away, he shook it off. He knew, now, what it was to be rejected and deserted. Dombey and Son was no more--his children no more.
His daughter Florence had married--married a young sailor once a boy in the office of Dombey and Son--and thinking of her, Dombey, in the solitude of his dismantled home, remembered that she had never changed to him through all those years; and the mist through which he had seen her, cleared, and showed him her true self.
He wandered through the rooms, and thought of suicide; a guilty hand was grasping what was in his breast.
It was arrested by a cry--a wild, loud, loving, rapturous cry, and he saw his daughter.
"Papa! Dearest papa!"
Unchanged still. Of all the world unchanged.
He tottered to his chair. He felt her draw his arms about her neck. He felt her kisses on his face, he felt--oh, how deeply!--all that he had done.
She laid his face, now covered with his hands, against the heart that he had almost broken, and said, sobbing, "Papa, love, I am a mother. Papa, dear, oh, say God bless me and my little child!"
His head, now grey, was encircled by her arm, and he groaned to think that never, never had it rested so before.
"My little child was born at sea, papa. I prayed to God to spare me that I might come. The moment I could land I came to you. Never let us be parted any more, papa!"