Stories from Dickens
Charles Dickens
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, May 18, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 Excerpt: ...or prevent their coming back." "I do not understand," said Florence, gazing on her agitated face, which seemed to darken as she looked. Her mother's clenched hand tightened on the trembling arm she had in hers, and as she looked down on the alarmed and wondering face, her own feelings subsided. "Oh, Florence!" she said, "I think I have been nearly mad to-night!" and humbled her proud head upon the girl's neck, and burst into tears. "Don't leave me! be near me! I have no hope but in you!" These words she said a score of times. Florence was greatly puzzled and distressed, and could only repeat her promise of love and trust. Through six months that followed upon Mr. Dombey's illness and recovery, no outward change was shown between him and his wife. Both were cold and proud; and-still Mr. Carker--a man whom she detested--bore his petty commands to her. As for Florence, the little hope she had ever held for happiness in their new home was quite gone now. That home was nearly two years old, and even the patient trust that was in her could not survive the daily blight of such an experience. Florence loved her father still, but by degrees had come to love him rather as some dear one who had been, or who might have been, than as the hard reality before her eyes. Something of the softened sadness with which she loved the memory of little Paul or her mother, seemed to enter now into her thoughts of him, and to make them, as it were, a dear remembrance. Whether it was that he was dead to her, and that partly for this reason, partly for his share in those old objects of her affection, and partly for the long association of him with hopes that were withered and tendernesses he had frozen, she could not have told; but the fath...