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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens


157

to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was
troubled, and his hand was not trust-worthy. 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-
there were many like her-such as the world will do well never to
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