he moment, my politeness, and say,
Lies, lies, lies. You know you suppressed the deed and kept the money.'

'Not for the money's sake, wretch!' She made a struggle as if she were
starting up; even as if, in her vehemence, she had almost risen on her
disabled feet. 'If Gilbert Clennam, reduced to imbecility, at the point
of death, and labouring under the delusion of some imaginary relenting
towards a girl of whom he had heard that his nephew had once had a fancy
for her which he had crushed out of him, and that she afterwards drooped
away into melancholy and withdrawal from all who knew her--if, in that
state of weakness, he dictated to me, whose life she had darkened with
her sin, and who had been appointed to know her wickedness from her
own hand and her own lips, a bequest meant as a recompense to her
for supposed unmerited suffering; was there no difference between my
spurning that injustice, and coveting mere money--a thing which you, and
your comrades in the prisons, may steal from anyone?'

'Time presses, madame. Take care!'

'If this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,' she returned,
'I would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous motives being
classed with those of stabbers and thieves.'

Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. 'One thousand guineas
to the little beauty you slowly hunted to death. One thousand guineas
to the youngest daughter her patron might have at fifty, or (if he
had none) brother's youngest daughter, on her coming of age, "as the
remembrance his disinterestedness may like best, of his protection of
a friendless young orphan girl." Two thousand guineas. What! You will
never come to the money?'

'That patron,' she was vehemently proceeding, when he checked her.

'Names! Call him Mr Frederick Dorrit. No more evasions.'

'That Frederick Dorrit was the beginning of it all. If he had not been
a player of music, and had not kept, in those days of his youth and
prosperity, an idle house where singers, and players, and such-like
children of Evil turned their backs on the Light and their faces to the
Darkness, she might have remained in her lowly station, and might not
have been raised out of it to be cast down. But, no. Satan entered into
that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent
and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl
with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then
Arthur