As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr.

Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively

intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced

themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him. They

were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but

they had been there. And so exactly was the expression repeated

on the fair young face of her who had crept along the wall to a

point where she could see him, and where she now stood looking

at him, with hands which at first had been only raised in

frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and shut out

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the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him,

trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm

young breast, and love it back to life and hopeso exactly was the

expression repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair

young face, that it looked as though it had passed like a moving

light, from him to her.

Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two,

less and less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought

the ground and looked about him in the old way. Finally with a

deep long sigh, he took the shoe up, and resumed his work.

“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a

whisper.

“Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I

have unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I

once knew so well. Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!”

She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the

bench on which he sat. There was something awful in his

unconsciousness of the figure that could have put out its hand and

touched him as he stooped over his labour.

Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood like a

spirit, beside him, and he bent over his work.

It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the

instrument in his hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay on that

side of him which was not the side on which she stood. He had

taken it up, and was stooping to work again, when his eyes caught

the skirt of her dress. He raised them, and saw her face. The two

spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a motion of

her hand. She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife,

though they had.

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He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips

began to form some words, though no sound proceeded from

them. By degrees, in the pauses of his quick and laboured

breathing, he was heard to say:

“What is this?”

With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands

to her lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her

breast, as if she laid his ruined head there.

“You are not the gaoler’s daughter?”