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Little Dorrit, whether speaking or silent, had preserved her quiet

earnestness and her loving look It had not been clouded, except for a

passing moment, until now But now that she was left alone with hiitated, and there was

repressed eht feel a little wounded, but her care was not

for herself Her thoughts still turned, as they always had turned, to

hi about her since their accession

to fortune, that even now she could never see hiun to assume form in her mind

She felt that, in what he had just now said to her and in his whole

bearing towards her, there was the well-known shadow of the Marshalsea

wall It took a new shape, but it was the old sad shadow She began

with sorrowful unwillingness to acknowledge to herself that she was

not strong enough to keep off the fear that no space in the life of man

could overcome that quarter of a century behind the prison bars She had

no bla to reproach hireat compassion and unbounded

tenderness This is why it was, that, even as he sat before her on his sofa, in the

brilliant light of a bright Italian day, the wonderful city without and

the splendours of an old palace within, she saw hiloo, and wished to take her