's father, who has all along been secretly pining in the ways of
virtuous ruggedness for those accursed snares which are called the Arts,
becomes acquainted with her. And so, a graceless orphan, training to be
a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit's agency, against
me, and I am humbled and deceived!--Not I, that is to say,' she added
quickly, as colour flushed into her face; 'a greater than I. What am I?'

Jeremiah Flintwinch, who had been gradually screwing himself towards
her, and who was now very near her elbow without her knowing it, made a
specially wry face of objection when she said these words, and moreover
twitched his gaiters, as if such pretensions were equivalent to little
barbs in his legs.

'Lastly,' she continued, 'for I am at the end of these things, and I
will say no more of them, and you shall say no more of them, and all
that remains will be to determine whether the knowledge of them can
be kept among us who are here present; lastly, when I suppressed that
paper, with the knowledge of Arthur's father--'

'But not with his consent, you know,' said Mr Flintwinch.

'Who said with his consent?' She started to find Jeremiah so near her,
and drew back her head, looking at him with some rising distrust. 'You
were often enough between us when he would have had me produce it and
I would not, to have contradicted me if I had said, with his consent. I
say, when I suppressed that paper, I made no effort to destroy it, but
kept it by me, here in this house, many years. The rest of the Gilbert
property being left to Arthur's father, I could at any time, without
unsettling more than the two sums, have made a pretence of finding
it. But, besides that I must have supported such pretence by a direct
falsehood (a great responsibility), I have seen no new reason, in
all the time I have been tried here, to bring it to light. It was a
rewarding of sin; the wrong result of a delusion. I did what I was
appointed to do, and I have undergone, within these four walls, what
I was appointed to undergo. When the paper was at last destroyed--as
I thought--in my presence, she had long been dead, and her patron,
Frederick Dorrit, had long been deservedly ruined and imbecile. He had
no daughter. I had found the niece before then; and what I did for her,
was better for her far than the money of which she would have had no
good.' She added, after a moment, as though she addressed the watch:
'She herself was innocent, a