embraces were bestowed upon the prisoner by as
many of both sexes as could rush at him, that
after his long and unwholesome confinement he
was in danger of fainting from exhaustion; none
the less because he knew very well, that the
very same people, carried by another current,
would have rushed at him with the very same
intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him
over the streets.

His removal, to make way for other accused
persons who were to be tried, rescued him from
these caresses for the moment. Five were to be
tried together, next, as enemies of the Republic,
forasmuch as they had not assisted it by word or
deed. So quick was the Tribunal to compensate
itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these
five came down to him before he left the place,
condemned to die within twenty-four hours. The
first of them told him so, with the customary
prison sign of Death—a raised finger—and they
all added in words, "Long live the Republic!"

The five had had, it is true, no audience to
lengthen their proceedings, for when he and
Doctor Manette emerged from the gate, there
was a great crowd about it, in which there
seemed to be every face he had seen in Court
except two, for which he looked in vain. On
his coming out, the concourse made at him anew,
weeping, embracing, and shouting, all by turns
and all together, until the very tide of the river
on the bank of which the mad scene was acted,
seemed to run mad, like the people on the
shore.

They put him into a great chair they had
among them, and which they had taken either
out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or
passages. Over the chair they had thrown a
red flag, and to the back of it they had bound a
pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of
triumph, not even the Doctor's entreaties could
prevent his being carried to his home on men's
shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving
about him, and casting up to sight from the
stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more
than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion,
and that he was in the tumbril on his way
to the Guillotine.

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing
whom they met and pointing him out, they
carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with
the prevailing Republican colour, in winding
and trampling through them, as they had
reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye,
they carried him thus into the court-yard of the
building where he lived. Her father had gone
on before, to prepare her, and when her husband
stood upon his feet, she dropped insensible in
his arms.

As he held her to his heart and turned her
beautiful head between his face and the brawling
crowd, so that his tears and her lips might
come together unseen, a few of the people fell to
dancing. Instantly, all the rest fell to dancing,
and the court-yard overflowed with the Carmagnole.
Then, they elevated into the vacant chair
a young woman from the crowd to be carried as
the Goddess of Liberty, and then, swelling and
overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and
along the river's bank, and over the bridge, the
Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled
them away.

After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood
victorious and proud before him; after grasping
the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting in
breathless from his struggle against the waterspout
of the Carmagnole; after kissing little
Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms round
his neck; and after embracing the ever zealous
and faithful Pross who lifted her; he took his
wife in his arms and carried her up to their
rooms.

"Lucie! My own! I am safe."

"O dearest Charles, let me thank God for
this on my knees as I have prayed to Him."

They all reverently bowed their heads and
hearts. When she was again in his arms, he
said to her:

"And now speak to your father, dearest. No
other man in all this France could have done
what he has done for me."

She laid her head upon her father's breast as
she had laid his poor head on her own breast,
long, long ago. He was happy in the return he had
made her, he was recompensed for his suffering,
he was proud of his strength. "You must not
be weak, my darling," he remonstrated; "don't
tremble so. I have saved him."

CHAPTER VII. A KNOCK AT THE DOOR.

"I HAVE saved him." It was not another of
the dreams in which he had often come back; he
was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and
a vague but heavy fear was upon her.

All the air around was so thick and dark, the
people were so passionately revengeful and fitful,
the innocent were so constantly put to death on
vague suspicion and black malice, it was so
impossible to forget that many as blameless as her
husband and as dear to others as he was to her,
every day shared the fate from which he had been
clutched, that her heart could not be as lightened
of its load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows
of the wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and
even now the dreadful carts were rolling through
the streets. Her mind pursued them, looking
for him among the Condemned; and then she
clung closer to his real presence and trembled
more.

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate
superiority to this woman's weakness,
which was wonderful to see. No garret, no
shoemaking, no One Hundred and Five, North Tower,
now! He had accomplished the task he had
set himself, his promise was redeemed, he had
saved Charles. Let them all lean upon him

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal
kind: not only because that was the safest way
of life, involving the least offence to the people,
but because they were not rich, and Charles,
throughout his imprisonment, had had to
pay heavily for his bad food, and for his
guard, and towards the living of the poorer
prisoners. Partly on this account, and partly
to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no servant;