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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