een burned, after all.

The wretched woman, seeing this sharp end to all her scheming, was
almost distracted. She had not walked a step for twelve years, but now
her excitement and frenzy gave her unnatural strength. She rose from her
invalid chair and ran with all her speed from the house. Old Affery, the
servant, followed her mistress, wringing her hands as she tried vainly
to overtake her.

Mrs. Clennam did not pause till she had reached the prison and found
Little Dorrit. She told her to open the packet at once and to read what
it contained, and then, kneeling at her feet, she promised to restore to
her all she had withheld, and begged her to forgive and to come back
with her to tell Rigaud that she already knew the secret and that he
might do his worst.

Little Dorrit was greatly moved to see the stern, gray-haired woman at
her feet. She raised and comforted her, assuring her that, come what
would, Arthur should never learn the truth from her lips. This return of
good for evil from the one she had most injured brought the tears to the
hard woman's eyes. "God bless you," she said in a broken voice.

Side by side they hastened back to the Clennam house, but as they
reached the entrance of its dark courtyard there came a sudden noise
like thunder. For one instant they saw the building, with the insolent
Rigaud waiting smoking in the window; then the walls heaved, surged
outward, opened and fell into pieces. Its great pile of chimneys rocked,
broke and tumbled on the fragments, and only a huge mass of timbers and
stone, with a cloud of dust hovering over it, marked the spot where it
had stood.

The rotten old building, propped up so long, had fallen at last. For
years old Affery had insisted that the house was haunted. She had often
heard mysterious rustlings and noises, and in the mornings sometimes she
would find little heaps of dust on the floors. Curious, crooked cracks
would appear, too, in the walls, and the doors would stick with no
apparent reason. These things, of course, had been caused by the gradual
settling of the crazy walls and timbers, which now finally had collapsed
all at once.

Frightened, they ran back to the street and there Mrs. Clennam's strange
strength left her, and she fell in a heap upon the pavement.

She never from that hour was able to speak a word or move a finger. She
lived for three years in a wheel-chair, but she lived--and died--like a
statue.

For two days workmen dug indus