the city to the boundless everlasting sea. Before their cells were

quit of them, new occupants were appointed; before their blood

ran into the blood spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle

with theirs tomorrow was already set apart.

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of

seventy, whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of

twenty, whose poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical

diseases, engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize

on victims of all degrees; and the frightful moral disorder, born of

unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless

indifference, smote equally without distinction.

Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no

flattering delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every

line of the narrative he had heard, he had heard his

condemnation. He had fully comprehended that no personal

influence could possibly save him, that he was virtually sentenced

by the millions, and that units could avail him nothing.

Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife

fresh before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His

hold on life was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen; by

gradual efforts and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the

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tighter there; and when he brought his strength to bear on that

hand and it yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry, too,

in all his thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his heart,

that contended against resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel

resigned, then his wife and child who had to live after him, seemed

to protest and to make it a selfish thing.

But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that

there was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers

went the same road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day,

sprang up to stimulate him. Next followed the thought that much

of the future peace of mind enjoyable by the dear ones, depended

on his quiet fortitude. So, by degrees he calmed into the better

state, when he could raise his thoughts much higher and draw

comfort down.

Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he

had travelled thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase

the means of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such

time as the prison lamps should be extinguished.

He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known

nothing of her father’s imprisonment, until he had heard of it from

herself, and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father’s and

uncle’s responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been

read. He had already explained to her that his concealment from

herself of the name he had relinquished, was the one condition

fully intelligible nowthat her father had attached to their

betrothal, and was the one promise he had still exacted on the

morning of their marriage. He entreated her, for her father’s sake,

never to seek to know whether her father had become oblivious of