“for ever” to a maimed creature like me? Are we not all cut down like the grass of the field, and was not I shorn by the scythe many years ago: since when I have been lying here, waiting to be gathered into the barn?’

‘Ay, ay! But since you have been lying here—not near dead— nothing like it—numbers of children and young people, blooming women, strong men, and what not, have been cut down and carried; and still here are you, you see, not much changed after all. Your time and mine may be a long one yet. When I say for ever, I mean (though I am not poetical) through all our time.’ Mr Flintwinch gave this explanation with great calmness, and calmly waited for an answer.

‘So long as Little Dorrit is quiet and industrious, and stands in need of the slight help I can give her, and deserves it; so long, I suppose, unless she withdraws of her own act, she will continue to come here, I being spared.’

‘Nothing more than that?’ said Flintwinch, stroking his mouth and chin.

‘What should there be more than that! What could there be more than that!’ she ejaculated in her sternly wondering way.

Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, that, for the space of a minute or two, they remained looking at each other with the candle between them, and that she somehow derived an impression that they looked at each other fixedly.

‘Do you happen to know, Mrs Clennam,’ Affery’s liege lord then demanded in a much lower voice, and with an amount of expression that seemed quite out of proportion to the simple purpose of his words, ‘where she lives?’

‘No.’

‘Would you—now, would you like to know?’ said Jeremiah with a pounce as if he had sprung upon her.

‘If I cared to know, I should know already. Could I not have asked her any day?’

‘Then you don’t care to know?’

‘I do not.’

Mr Flintwinch, having expelled a long significant breath said, with his former emphasis, ‘For I have accidentally—mind!—found out.’

‘Wherever she lives,’ said Mrs Clennam, speaking in one unmodulated hard voice, and separating her words as distinctly as if she were reading them off from separate bits of metal that she took up one by one, ‘she has made a secret of it, and she shall always keep her secret from me.’

‘After all, perhaps you would rather not have known the fact, any how?’ said Jeremiah; and he said it with a twist, as if his words had come out of him in his own wry shape.

‘Flintwinch,’ said his mistress and partner, flashing into a sudden energy that made Affery start, ‘why do you goad me? Look round this room. If it is any compensation for my long confinement within these narrow limits—not that I complain of being afflicted; you know I never complain of that—if it is any compensation to me for long confinement to this room, that while I am shut up from all pleasant change I am also shut up from the knowledge of some things that I may prefer to avoid knowing, why should you, of all men, grudge me that belief?’

‘I don’t grudge it to you,’ returned Jeremiah.