re--' Clennam choked, and coughed, and stopped.

'Yes, you have taken cold,' said Daniel Doyce. But without looking at
him.

'There is an engagement between them, of course?' said Clennam airily.

'No. As I am told, certainly not. It has been solicited on the
gentleman's part, but none has been made. Since their recent return,
our friend has yielded to a weekly visit, but that is the utmost. Minnie
would not deceive her father and mother. You have travelled with them,
and I believe you know what a bond there is among them, extending even
beyond this present life. All that there is between Miss Minnie and Mr
Gowan, I have no doubt we see.'

'Ah! We see enough!' cried Arthur.

Mr Doyce wished him Good Night in the tone of a man who had heard a
mournful, not to say despairing, exclamation, and who sought to infuse
some encouragement and hope into the mind of the person by whom it had
been uttered. Such tone was probably a part of his oddity, as one of
a crotchety band; for how could he have heard anything of that kind,
without Clennam's hearing it too?

The rain fell heavily on the roof, and pattered on the ground, and
dripped among the evergreens and the leafless branches of the trees. The
rain fell heavily, drearily. It was a night of tears.

If Clennam had not decided against falling in love with Pet; if he
had had the weakness to do it; if he had, little by little, persuaded
himself to set all the earnestness of his nature, all the might of his
hope, and all the wealth of his matured character, on that cast; if
he had done this and found that all was lost; he would have been,
that night, unutterably miserable. As it was--As it was, the rain fell
heavily, drearily.

CHAPTER 18. Little Dorrit's Lover

Little Dorrit had not attained her twenty-second birthday without
finding a lover. Even in the shallow Marshalsea, the ever young Archer
shot off a few featherless arrows now and then from a mouldy bow, and
winged a Collegian or two.

Little Dorrit's lover, however, was not a Collegian. He was the
sentimental son of a turnkey. His father hoped, in the fulness of time,
to leave him the inheritance of an unstained key; and had from his
early youth familiarised him with the duties of his office, and with an
ambition to retain the prison-lock in the family. While the succession
was yet in abeyance, he assisted his mother in the conduct of a snug
tobacco business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane (his fath