altogether. I am in now, as one of the regulars.'

'Oh! Don't say you are a prisoner, Tip! Don't, don't!'

'Well, I don't want to say it,' he returned in a reluctant tone;
'but if you can't understand me without my saying it, what am I to
do? I am in for forty pound odd.'

For the first time in all those years, she sunk under her cares.
She cried, with her clasped hands lifted above her head, that it
would kill their father if he ever knew it; and fell down at Tip's
graceless feet.

It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to
bring him to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be
beside himself if he knew the truth. The thing was
incomprehensible to Tip, and altogether a fanciful notion. He
yielded to it in that light only, when he submitted to her
entreaties, backed by those of his uncle and sister. There was no
want of precedent for his return; it was accounted for to the
father in the usual way; and the collegians, with a better
comprehension of the pious fraud than Tip, supported it loyally.

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the
Marshalsea at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the
one miserable yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home,
she passed to and fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly
consciousness that she was pointed out to every one. Since she had
begun to work beyond the walls, she had found it necessary to
conceal where she lived, and to come and go as secretly as she