hich Clennam lived and where he carried on the London branch of his
business.

It was an old brick house separated from the street by a rusty
courtyard. It seemed to have once been about to slide down sidewise, but
had been propped up as though it leaned on some half-dozen gigantic
crutches. Inside it was dark and miserable, with sunken floors and
blackened furniture. In a corner of the sitting-room was an ugly old
clock that was wound once a week with an iron handle, and on the walls
were pictures showing the "Plagues of Egypt." The only pleasure the grim
woman enjoyed was reading aloud from those parts of the Old Testament
which call for dreadful punishments to fall upon all the enemies of the
righteous, and in these passages she gloried.

In this melancholy place the boy Arthur Clennam grew up in silence and
in dread, wondering much why they lived so lonely and why his father and
mother (for so he thought Mrs. Clennam to be) sat always so silent with
faces turned from each other.

There were but two servants, an old woman named Affery, and Flintwinch,
her husband, a short, bald man, who was both clerk and footman, and who
carried his head awry and walked in a one-sided crab-like way, as though
he were falling and needed propping up like the house. Flintwinch was
cunning and without conscience. Very few secrets his mistress had which
he did not know, and they often quarreled.

At length the uncle, who had compelled the unhappy marriage of Arthur's
father, died. Feeling sorry at the last for the wretched singer, whose
life had been ruined, he left her in his will a sum of money, and
another sum to the youngest niece of the man who had befriended and
educated her--Mr. Dorrit.

This money, however, Mrs. Clennam did not intend either the woman she
hated or the niece of her patron should get. She hid the part of the
will which referred to it, and made Flintwinch (who, beside her husband,
was the only one who knew of it) promise not to tell. Arthur's father
she compelled to sail to China, to take charge of the branch of his
business in that country, and when Arthur was old enough, she sent him
there also.

For twenty years, while Arthur stayed with his father on the other side
of the world, Mrs. Clennam, cold and unforgiving as ever, lived on in
the old, tumbling house, carrying on the London business with the aid of
Flintwinch.

The poor, forsaken singer lost her mind and at last died. Mr. Dorrit, of
course, knowi