'

'How it is, you prevaricating little piece of goods!' cried Fanny. 'You
know how it is. I have told you already, so don't fly in the face of
Providence by attempting to deny it!'

'Hush! Amy,' said the father, passing his pocket-handkerchief several
times across his face, and then grasping it convulsively in the hand
that dropped across his knee, 'I have done what I could to keep you
select here; I have done what I could to retain you a position here. I
may have succeeded; I may not. You may know it; you may not. I give no
opinion. I have endured everything here but humiliation. That I have
happily been spared--until this day.'

Here his convulsive grasp unclosed itself, and he put his
pocket-handkerchief to his eyes again. Little Dorrit, on the ground
beside him, with her imploring hand upon his arm, watched him
remorsefully. Coming out of his fit of grief, he clenched his
pocket-handkerchief once more.

'Humiliation I have happily been spared until this day. Through all
my troubles there has been that--Spirit in myself, and that--that
submission to it, if I may use the term, in those about me, which has
spared me--ha--humiliation. But this day, this minute, I have keenly
felt it.'

'Of course! How could it be otherwise?' exclaimed the irrepressible
Fanny. 'Careering and prancing about with a Pauper!' (air-gun again).

'But, dear father,' cried Little Dorrit, 'I don't justify myself for
having wounded your dear heart--no! Heaven knows I don't!' She clasped
her hands in quite an agony of distress. 'I do nothing but beg and pray
you to be comforted and overlook it. But if I had not known that you
were kind to the old man yourself, and took much notice of him, and were
always glad to see him, I would not have come here with him, father, I
would not, indeed. What I have been so unhappy as to do, I have done
in mistake. I would not wilfully bring a tear to your eyes, dear love!'
said Little Dorrit, her heart well-nigh broken, 'for anything the world
could give me, or anything it could take away.'

Fanny, with a partly angry and partly repentant sob, began to cry
herself, and to say--as this young lady always said when she was half in
passion and half out of it, half spiteful with herself and half spiteful
with everybody else--that she wished she were dead.

The Father of the Marshalsea in the meantime took his younger daughter
to his breast, and patted her head. 'There, there! Say no more, Amy,
say no more, my