but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while
yours was incomplete?”
“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been
quite happy with you.”
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have
been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been
Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life
would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen
on you.”
It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him
refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new
sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it
long afterwards.
“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards
the moon. “I have looked at her, from my prison-window, when I
could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been
such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost,
that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked
at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of
nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her
at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I
c