She sighed “No.”

“Who are you?”

Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the

bench beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his

arm. A strange thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly

passed over his frame; he laid the knife down softly, as he sat

staring at her.

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been

hurriedly pushed aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing

his hand by little and little, he took it up and looked at it. In the

midst of the action he went astray, and, with another deep sigh,

fell to work at his shoemaking.

But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his

shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to

be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his

hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of

folded rag attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee,

and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or

two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off

upon his finger.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. “It

is the same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!”

As the concentrating expression returned to his forehead, he

seemed to become conscious that it was in her too. He turned her

full to the light, and looked at her.

“She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I

was summoned outshe had a fear of my going, though I had

noneand when I was brought to the North Tower they found

these upon my sleeve. ‘You will leave me them? They can never

help me to escape in the body, though they may in the spirit.’

Those were the words I said. I remember them very well.”

He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could

utter it. But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to

him coherently, though slowly.

“How was this?Was it you?”

Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her

with a frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his grasp,

and only said, in a low voice, “I entreat you, good gentlemen, do

not come near us, do not speak, do not move!”

“Hark” he exclaimed. “Whose voice was that?”

His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to

his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as

everything but his shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded

his little packet and tried to secure it in his breast; but he still

looked at her, and gloomily shook his head.

“No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t be. See

what the prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not

the face she knew, this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She

wasand He wasbefore the slow years of the North Tower