On the first night of his return to the house of his childhood Arthur had noticed there a little seamstress, with pale, transparent face, hazel eyes and a figure as small as a child\'s. She wore a spare thin dress, spoke little, and passed through the rooms noiselessly and shy. They called her "Little Dorrit." She came in the morning and sewed quietly till nightfall, when she vanished. It had been so rare in the old days for any one to please the mistress of that gloomy house that the little creature\'s presence there interested Arthur[Pg 267] greatly and he longed to know something of her history.

He soon found there was nothing to be learned from Flintwinch, and so one night he followed Little Dorrit when she left the house. To his great surprise he saw her finally enter a great bare building surrounded with spiked walls and called The Marshalsea.

This was a famous prison where debtors were kept. In those days the law not only permitted a man to be put in jail for debt, but compelled him to stay there till all he owed was paid—a strange custom, since while he was in jail he was unable to earn any money to pay with. In fact, in many cases poor debtors had to stay there all their lives.

Inside the walls of the Marshalsea the wives and children of unfortunate prisoners were allowed to come to live with them just as in a boarding-house or hotel, but the debtors themselves could never pass out of the gate. Arthur entered the prison ignorant of its rules and so stayed too long, for presently the bell for closing rang, the gates were shut, and he had to stay inside all night. This was not so pleasant, but it gave him a chance easily to find out all he wished to learn of Little Dorrit\'s history.

Her father, before she was born, had lost all his money through a business failure, and had thus been thrown into the Marshalsea. There Amy, or[Pg 268] Little Dorrit, as they came to call her, was born; there her mother had languished away, and there she herself had always lived, mothering her pretty frivolous sister Fanny, and her lazy, ne\'er-do-well brother, "Tip."

Her father had been an inmate of the prison so many years that he was called "The Father of the Marshalsea." From being a haughty man of wealth, he had become a shabby old white-haired dignitary with a soft manner, who took little gifts of money which any one gave him half-shame-facedly and to the mortification of Little Dorrit alone.

The child had grown up the favorite of the turnkeys and of all the prison, calling the high, blank walls "home." When she was a little slip of a girl she had her sister and brother sent to night-school for a time, and later taught herself fine sewing, so that at the time Arthur Clennam returned to London she was working every day outside the walls, for small wages. Each night she returned to the prison to prepare her father\'s supper, bringing him whatever she could hide from her own dinner at the house where she sewed, loving him devotedly through all.

She even had a would-be lover, too. The son of one of the turnkeys, a young man with weak legs and weak, light hair, soft-hearted and soft-headed, had long pursued her in vain. He was now engaged in seeking comfort for his hopeless love[Pg 269] by composing epitaphs for his own tombstone, such as:

Here Lie the Mortal Remains of
JOHN CHIVERY
Never Anything Worth Mentioning
Who Died of a Broken Heart, Requesting With
His Last Breath that the Word
AMY
Might be Inscribed Over His Ashes
Which Was Done by His Afflicted Parents

Old Mr. Dorrit held his position among the Marshalsea prisoners with great fancied dignity and received all visitors and new-comers in his room like a man of society at home. During that evening Arthur called on him and treated the old man so courteously and talked to Little Dorrit with such kindness that she began to love him from that moment.

Many things of Little Dorrit\'s pathetic story Arthur learned that night. His first surprise at finding her in the Clennam house mingled strangely with his old thought that his father on his death-bed seemed to be troubled by some remorseful memory; and as he slept in the gloomy prison he dreamed that the little seamstress was in some mysterious way mingled with this wrong and remorse.

There was more truth than fancy in this dream. Not knowing the true history of his parentage, and wholly ignorant of the sad life and death of the[Pg 270] poor singer, his own unhappy mother, Arthur had never heard the name Dorrit. He did not know, to be sure, that it was the name of the wealthy patron who had once educated her. As a matter of fact, this patron had been Little Dorrit\'s own uncle, who now was living in poverty. It was to his youngest niece that the will Mrs. Clennam had wickedly hidden declared the money should go. And as Little Dorrit was this niece, it rightfully belonged to her. The real reason of Mrs. Clennam\'s apparent kindness to Little Dorrit was the pricking of her conscience, which gave her no rest.

But all this Arthur could not guess. Nevertheless, he had gained such an interest in the little seamstress that next day he determined to find out all he could about her father\'s unfortunate affairs.

He had great difficulty in this. The Government had taken charge of old Mr. Dorrit\'s debts, and his affairs were in the hands of a department which some people sneeringly called the "Circumlocution Office"—because it took so much time and talk for it to accomplish anything. This department had a great many clerks, every one of whom seemed t............