garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible

to Lucie, in a hushed murmurlike the breathing of a summer sea

asleep upon a sandy shoreas the little Lucie, comically studious

at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s

footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were

blended in her life.

The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney

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Carton. Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his

privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them

through the evening, as he had once done often. He never came

there heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was

whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true

echoes for ages and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with

a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and

a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with himan

instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities

are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so

here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out

her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The

little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss

him for me!”

Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some

great engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his

useful friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so

favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so,

Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom,

unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any

stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to

lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion’s

jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to

be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with

property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining

about them but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage

of the most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before

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him like three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered

as pupils to Lucie’s husband: delicately saying, “Halloa! here are

three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic,

Darnay!” The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread-and-

cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation, which he

afterwards turned to account in the training of the young

gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride of Beggars,

like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming to

Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay

had once put in practice to ‘catch’ him, and on the diamond-cut-

diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to

be caught.’ Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were