r the great house of Dombey and Son fell, and in
the crash its proud head became a ruined man, ruined beyond recovery.

Bankrupt in purse, his personal pride was yet further humbled. For Mr.
Dombey had married again, a loveless match, and his wife deserted him.
In the hour when he discovered that desertion he had driven his daughter
Florence from the house.

He was fallen now never to be raised up any more. For the night of his
worldly ruin there was no to-morrow's sun, for the stain of his domestic
shame there was no purification.

In his pride--for he was proud yet--he let the world go from him freely.
As it fell away, he shook it off. He knew, now, what it was to be
rejected and deserted. Dombey and Son was no more--his children no more.

His daughter Florence had married--married a young sailor once a boy in
the office of Dombey and Son--and thinking of her, Dombey, in the
solitude of his dismantled home, remembered that she had never changed
to him through all those years; and the mist through which he had seen
her, cleared, and showed him her true self.

He wandered through the rooms, and thought of suicide; a guilty hand was
grasping what was in his breast.

It was arrested by a cry--a wild, loud, loving, rapturous cry, and he
saw his daughter.

"Papa! Dearest papa!"

Unchanged still. Of all the world unchanged.

He tottered to his chair. He felt her draw his arms about her neck. He
felt her kisses on his face, he felt--oh, how deeply!--all that he had
done.

She laid his face, now covered with his hands, against the heart that he
had almost broken, and said, sobbing, "Papa, love, I am a mother. Papa,
dear, oh, say God bless me and my little child!"

His head, now grey, was encircled by her arm, and he groaned to think
that never, never had it rested so before.

"My little child was born at sea, papa. I prayed to God to spare me that
I might come. The moment I could land I came to you. Never let us be
parted any more, papa!"

He kissed her on the lips, and lifting up his eyes, said, "Oh, my God,
forgive me, for I need it very much!"

* * * * *

Great Expectations

"Great Expectations," first published as a serial in "All the
Year Round," in 1861, is one of Dickens's finest works. It is
rounded off so completely and the characters are so admirably
drawn that, as a finished work of art, it is hard to say where
the genius of its au