t if this man is silenced, I would tell it myself, before I would
bear the torment of the hearing it from him.'

Rigaud pushed his chair a little back; pushed his legs out straight
before him; and sat with his arms folded over against her.

'You do not know what it is,' she went on addressing him, 'to be brought
up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth
of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression,
punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our
ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us--these
were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me
with an abhorrence of evil-doers. When old Mr Gilbert Clennam proposed
his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon
me that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint.
He told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he
had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and
where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me
that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged
him as one; and that from his school-days to that hour, his uncle's roof
has been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious
and dissolute. When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found
my husband, at that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned
against the Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my
place, was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the
discovery, and that it was appointed to me to lay the hand of punishment
upon that creature of perdition? Was I to dismiss in a moment--not my
own wrongs--what was I! but all the rejection of sin, and all the war
against it, in which I had been bred?' She laid her wrathful hand upon
the watch on the table.

'No! "Do not forget." The initials of those words are within here now,
and were within here then. I was appointed to find the old letter that
referred to them, and that told me what they meant, and whose work they
were, and why they were worked, lying with this watch in his secret
drawer. But for that appointment there would have been no discovery.
"Do not forget." It spoke to me like a voice from an angry cloud. Do
not forget the deadly sin, do not forget the appointed discovery, do not
forget the appointed suffering. I did not forget. Was it my own wrong I
remembered? Min