change his unconscious attitude, but drained his
little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water,
and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame
Defarge poured it out for him, took to her knitting
again, and hummed a little song over it.

"You seem to know this quarter well; that
is to say, better than I do?" observed Defarge.

"Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I
am so profoundly interested in its miserable
inhabitants."

"Hah!" muttered Defarge.

"The pleasure of conversing with you,
Monsieur Defarge, recals to me," pursued the spy,
"that I have the honour of cherishing some
interesting associations with your name."

"Indeed?" said Defarge, with much indifference.

"Yes indeed. When Doctor Manette was
released, you his old domestic had the charge
of him, I know. He was delivered to you.
You see I am informed of the circumstances?"

"Such is the fact, certainly," said Defarge.
He had had it conveyed to him, in an accidental
touch of his wife's elbow as she knitted and
warbled, that he would do best to answer, but
always with brevity.

"It was to you," said the spy, "that his
daughter came; and it was from your care that
his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat
brown monsieur; how is he called?—in a little
wig—Lorry—of the bank of Tellson and
Company—over to England."

"Such is the fact," repeated Defarge.

"Very interesting remembrances!" said the
spy. "I have known Doctor Manette and his
daughter, in England."

"Yes?" said Defarge.

"You don't hear much about them now," said
the spy.

"No," said Defarge.

"In effect," madame struck in, looking up
from her work and her little song, "we never
hear about them. We received the news of their
safe arrival, and perhaps another letter or
perhaps two; but since then, they have gradually
taken their road in life—we, ours—and we have
held no correspondence."

"Perfectly so, madame," replied the spy.
"She is going to be married."

"Going?" echoed madame. "She was
pretty enough to have been married long ago.
You English are cold, it seems to me."

"Oh! You know I am English?"

"I perceive your tongue is," returned
madame; "and what the tongue is, I suppose
the man is."

He did not take the identification as a
compliment; but, he made the best of it, and turned
it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to
the end, he added:

"Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married.
But not to an Englishman; to one who, like
herself, is French by birth. And speaking of
Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was cruel,
Cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going
to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis,
for whom Gaspard was exalted to that height of
so many feet; in other words, the present
Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is
no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles Darnay.
D'Aulnais is the name of his mother's family."

Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the
intelligence had a palpable effect upon her husband.
Do what he would, behind the little counter, as
to the striking of a light and the lighting of his
pipe, he was troubled, and his hand was not
trustworthy. The spy would have been no spy
if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his
mind.

Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever
it might prove to be worth, and no customers
coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad
paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave:
taking occasion to say, in a genteel manner,
before he departed, that he looked forward to the
pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame
Defarge again. For some minutes after he had
emerged into the outer presence of Saint
Antoine, the husband and wife remained exactly
as he had left them, lest he should come back.

"Can it be true," said Defarge, in a low
voice, looking down at his wife as he stood
smoking with his hand on the back of her chair:
"what he has said of Ma'amselle Manette?"

"As he has said it," returned madame, lifting
her eyebrows a little, "it is probably false. But
it may be true."

"If it is——" Defarge began; and stopped.

"If it is?" repeated his wife.

"—And if it does come, while we live to see
it triumph—I hope, for her sake, Destiny will
keep her husband out of France."

"Her husband's destiny," said Madame
Defarge, with her usual composure, "will take
him where he is to go, and will lead him to the
end that is to end him. That is all I know."

"But it is very strange—now, at least is it
not very strange"—said Defarge, rather pleading
with his wife to induce her to admit it, "that,
after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father
and herself, her husband's name should be
proscribed under your hand at this moment, by
the side of that infernal dog's who has just left
us?"

"Stranger things than that, will happen when
it does come," answered madame. "I have
them both here, of a certainty; and they are both
here for their merits; that is enough."

She rolled up her knitting when she had said
those words, and presently took the rose out of
the handkerchief that was wound about her
head. Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive
sense that the objectionable decoration was
gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its
disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage
to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the
wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others,
Saint Antoine turned himself inside out, and sat
on door-steps and window-ledges, and came
to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a
breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work
in her hand was accustomed to pass from place
to place and from group to group: a Missionary