“Nor written?”

“Never.”

“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your selfdenial

is to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her

father thanks you.”

He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.

“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know,

Doctor Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day,

that between you and Miss Manette there is an affection so

unusual, so touching, so belonging to the circumstances in which

it has been nurtured, that it can have few parallels, even in the

tenderness between a father and child. I know, Doctor Manette

how can I fail to knowthat, mingled with the affection and duty

of a daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her heart,

towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy itself. I know that,

as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted to

you with all the constancy and fervour of her present years and

character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the early

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if you

had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you

could hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred

character than that in which you are always with her. I know that

when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all

in one, are round your neck. I know that in loving you she sees and

loves her mother at her own age, sees and loves you at my age,

loves her mother broken-hearted, loves you through your dreadful

trial and in your blessed restoration. I have known this, night and

day, since I have known you in your home.”

Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing

was a little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.

“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her

and you with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and

forborne, as long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt,

and do even now feel, that to bring my loveeven minebetween

you, is to touch your history with something not quite so good as

itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness that I love her!”

“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought

so before now. I believe it.”

“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the

mournful voice struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my

fortune were so cast as that, being one day so happy as to make

her my wife, I must at any time put any separation between her

and you, I could or would breathe a word of what I now say.

Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I should know it to be

a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at a remote distance

of years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my heartif it

ever had been thereif it ever could be thereI could not now

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

touch this honoured hand.”