he had looked when he
was prosperous and happy; as he had so touched her by imagining that he
might look once more in that awful time. At the thought of that time,
she kneeled beside his bed again, and prayed, 'O spare his life! O
save him to me! O look down upon my dear, long-suffering, unfortunate,
much-changed, dear dear father!'

Not until the morning came to protect him and encourage him, did she
give him a last kiss and leave the small room. When she had stolen
down-stairs, and along the empty yard, and had crept up to her own
high garret, the smokeless housetops and the distant country hills were
discernible over the wall in the clear morning. As she gently opened the
window, and looked eastward down the prison yard, the spikes upon the
wall were tipped with red, then made a sullen purple pattern on the sun
as it came flaming up into the heavens. The spikes had never looked so
sharp and cruel, nor the bars so heavy, nor the prison space so gloomy
and contracted. She thought of the sunrise on rolling rivers, of the
sunrise on wide seas, of the sunrise on rich landscapes, of the
sunrise on great forests where the birds were waking and the trees were
rustling; and she looked down into the living grave on which the sun
had risen, with her father in it three-and-twenty years, and said, in
a burst of sorrow and compassion, 'No, no, I have never seen him in my
life!'

CHAPTER 20. Moving in Society

If Young John Chivery had had the inclination and the power to write a
satire on family pride, he would have had no need to go for an avenging
illustration out of the family of his beloved. He would have found it
amply in that gallant brother and that dainty sister, so steeped in mean
experiences, and so loftily conscious of the family name; so ready
to beg or borrow from the poorest, to eat of anybody's bread, spend
anybody's money, drink from anybody's cup and break it afterwards.
To have painted the sordid facts of their lives, and they throughout
invoking the death's head apparition of the family gentility to come and
scare their benefactors, would have made Young John a satirist of the
first water.

Tip had turned his liberty to hopeful account by becoming a
billiard-marker. He had troubled himself so little as to the means of
his release, that Clennam scarcely needed to have been at the pains of
impressing the mind of Mr Plornish on that subject. Whoever had paid
him the compliment, he very readily accepted t