ngth crept to his chair by the open window.
In it he sat dozing, while the old woman who arranged his room went
through her morning's work.

Light of head with want of sleep and want of food (his appetite, and
even his sense of taste, having forsaken him), he had been two or three
times conscious, in the night, of going astray. He had heard fragments
of tunes and songs in the warm wind, which he knew had no existence.
Now that he began to doze in exhaustion, he heard them again; and voices
seemed to address him, and he answered, and started.

Dozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning time, so that
a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute, some abiding
impression of a garden stole over him--a garden of flowers, with a
damp warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a painful
effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into this, or
inquiring into anything, that the impression appeared to have become
quite an old and importunate one when he looked round. Beside the
tea-cup on his table he saw, then, a blooming nosegay: a wonderful
handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers.

Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them up and
inhaled their fragrance, and he lifted them to his hot head, and he put
them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold hands are opened
to receive the cheering of a fire. It was not until he had delighted in
them for some time, that he wondered who had sent them; and opened his
door to ask the woman who must have put them there, how they had come
into her hands. But she was gone, and seemed to have been long gone; for
the tea she had left for him on the table was cold. He tried to drink
some, but could not bear the odour of it: so he crept back to his chair
by the open window, and put the flowers on the little round table of
old.

When the first faintness consequent on having moved about had left him,
he subsided into his former state. One of the night-tunes was playing
in the wind, when the door of his room seemed to open to a light touch,
and, after a moment's pause, a quiet figure seemed to stand there, with
a black mantle on it. It seemed to draw the mantle off and drop it on
the ground, and then it seemed to be his Little Dorrit in her old, worn
dress. It seemed to tremble, and to clasp its hands, and to smile, and
to burst into tears.

He roused himself, and cried out. And then he saw, in the loving,
pitying,