‘Your father can be free within this week. He does not know it; we must go to him from here, to tell him of it. Your father will be free within a few days. Your father will be free within a few hours. Remember we must go to him from here, to tell him of it!’

That brought her back. Her eyes were closing, but they opened again.

‘This is not all the good-fortune. This is not all the wonderful good-fortune, my dear Little Dorrit. Shall I tell you more?’

Her lips shaped ‘Yes.’

‘Your father will be no beggar when he is free. He will want for nothing. Shall I tell you more? Remember! He knows nothing of it; we must go to him, from here, to tell him of it!’

She seemed to entreat him for a little time. He held her in his arm, and, after a pause, bent down his ear to listen.

‘Did you ask me to go on?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will be a rich man. He is a rich man. A great sum of money is waiting to be paid over to him as his inheritance; you are all henceforth very wealthy. Bravest and best of children, I thank Heaven that you are rewarded!’

As he kissed her, she turned her head towards his shoulder, and raised her arm towards his neck; cried out ‘Father! Father! Father!’ and swooned away.

Upon which Flora returned to take care of her, and hovered about her on a sofa, intermingling kind offices and incoherent scraps of conversation in a manner so confounding, that whether she pressed the Marshalsea to take a spoonful of unclaimed dividends, for it would do her good; or whether she congratulated Little Dorrit’s father on coming into possession of a hundred thousand smelling-bottles; or whether she explained that she put seventy-five thousand drops of spirits of lavender on fifty thousand pounds of lump sugar, and that she entreated Little Dorrit to take that gentle restorative; or whether she bathed the foreheads of Doyce and Clennam in vinegar, and gave the late Mr F. more air; no one with any sense of responsibility could have undertaken to decide. A tributary stream of confusion, moreover, poured in from an adjoining bedroom, where Mr F.’s Aunt appeared, from the sound of her voice, to be in a horizontal posture, awaiting her breakfast; and from which bower that inexorable lady snapped off short taunts, whenever she could get a hearing, as, ‘Don’t believe it’s his doing!’ and ‘He needn’t take no credit to himself for it!’ and ‘It’ll be long enough, I expect, afore he’ll give up any of his own money!’ all designed to disparage Clennam’s share in the discovery, and to relieve those inveterate feelings with which Mr F.’s Aunt regarded him.

But Little Dorrit’s solicitude to get to her father, and to carry the joyful tidings to him, and not to leave him in his jail a moment with this happiness in store for him and still unknown to him, did more for her speedy restoration than all the skill and attention on earth could have done. ‘Come with me to my dear father. Pray come and tell my dear father!’ were the first words she said. Her father, her father. She spoke of nothing but him, thought of nothing but him. Kneeling down and pouring out her thankfulness with uplifted hands, her thanks were for her father.

Flora’s tenderness was quite overcome by this, and she launched out among the cups and saucers into a wonderful flow of tears and speech.

‘I declare,’ she sobbed, ‘I never was so cut up since your mama and my papa not Doyce and Clennam for this once but give the precious little thing a cup of tea and make her put it to her lips at least pray Arthur do, not even Mr F.’s last illness for that was of another kind and gout is not a child’s affection