aid no more, but sat apart; the mother communing with her money;
the daughter with her thoughts; the glance of each, shining in the gloom
of the feebly lighted room. Rob slept and snored. The disregarded parrot
only was in action. It twisted and pulled at the wires of its cage, with
its crooked beak, and crawled up to the dome, and along its roof like
a fly, and down again head foremost, and shook, and bit, and rattled at
every slender bar, as if it knew its master's danger, and was wild to
force a passage out, and fly away to warn him of it.

CHAPTER 53. More Intelligence

There were two of the traitor's own blood--his renounced brother and
sister--on whom the weight of his guilt rested almost more heavily, at
this time, than on the man whom he had so deeply injured. Prying and
tormenting as the world was, it did Mr Dombey the service of nerving him
to pursuit and revenge. It roused his passion, stung his pride, twisted
the one idea of his life into a new shape, and made some gratification
of his wrath, the object into which his whole intellectual existence
resolved itself. All the stubbornness and implacability of his nature,
all its hard impenetrable quality, all its gloom and moroseness, all its
exaggerated sense of personal importance, all its jealous disposition
to resent the least flaw in the ample recognition of his importance by
others, set this way like many streams united into one, and bore him on
upon their tide. The most impetuously passionate and violently impulsive
of mankind would have been a milder enemy to encounter than the sullen
Mr Dombey wrought to this. A wild beast would have been easier turned
or soothed than the grave gentleman without a wrinkle in his starched
cravat.

But the very intensity of his purpose became almost a substitute for
action in it. While he was yet uninformed of the traitor's retreat, it
served to divert his mind from his own calamity, and to entertain it
with another prospect. The brother and sister of his false favourite had
no such relief; everything in their history, past and present, gave his
delinquency a more afflicting meaning to them.

The sister may have sometimes sadly thought that if she had remained
with him, the companion and friend she had been once, he might have
escaped the crime into which he had fallen. If she ever thought so, it
was still without regret for what she had done, without the least doubt
of her duty, without any pricing or enhancing o