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


257

this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean himself as
to make himself one?” “I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton,
taking the answer on himself, and looking at his watch, “without
any scruple, in a very few minutes.” “I should have hoped,
gentlemen both,” said the spy, always striving to hook Mr. Lorry
into the discussion, “that your respect for my sister--” “I could not
better testify my respect for your sister than by finally relieving her
of her brother,” said Sydney Carton.

“You think not, sir?” “I have thoroughly made up my mind about
it.” The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his
ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual
demeanour, received such a check from the inscrutability of
Carton,- who was a mystery to wiser and honester men than he,-
that it faltered here and failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton
said, resuming his former air of contemplating cards:
“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I
have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and
fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the country
prisons; who was he?” “French. You don’t know him,” said the
spy, quickly.

“French, eh?” repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to
notice him at all, though he echoed his word. “Well; he may be.”
“Is, I assure you,” said the spy; “though it’s not important.”
“Though it’s not important,” repeated Carton, in the same
mechanical way“though it’s not important-No, it’s not important.
No. Yet I know the face.” “I think not. I am sure not. It can’t be,”
said the spy.

“It-can’t-be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and filling
his glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. “Can’t-be.
Spoke good French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?” “Provincial,”
said the spy.

“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table, as
a light broke clearly on his mind. “Cly! Disguised, but the same
man. We had that man before us at the Old Bailey.” “Now, there
you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that gave his aquiline
nose an extra inclination to one side; “there you really give me an
advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit, at this
distance of time, was a part-ner of mine) has been dead several
years. I attended him in his last illness. He was buried in London,
at the church of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. His unpopularity with
the blackguard multitude at the moment prevented my following
his remains, but I helped to lay him in his coffin.” Here, Mr. Lorry
became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable goblin
shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered it to be
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