He put his hands together, as he had been used to do at his prayers.  He did not remove his arms to do it, but they saw him fold them so behind her neck.

“Mamma is like you, Floy.  I know her by the face!  The light about her head is shining on me as I go.”

The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room.  The old, old fashion!  The fashion that came in with our first parents, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll.  The old, old fashion—­Death!

V.—­The End of Dombey and Son

The stonemason to whom Mr. Dombey gave his order for a tablet in the church, in memory of little Paul, called his attention to the inscription “Beloved and only child,” and said, “It should be ‘son,’ I think, sir?”

“You are right, of course.  Make the correction.”

And there came a time when it was to Florence, and Florence only, that Mr. Dombey turned.  For the great house of Dombey and Son fell, and in the crash its proud head became a ruined man, ruined beyond recovery.

Bankrupt in purse, his personal pride was yet further humbled.  For Mr. Dombey had married again, a loveless match, and his wife deserted him.  In the hour when he discovered that desertion he had driven his daughter Florence from the house.

He was fallen now never to be raised up any more.  For the night of his worldly ruin there was no to-morrow’s sun, for the stain of his domestic shame there was no purification.

In his pride—­for he was proud yet—­he let the world go from him freely.  As it fell away, he shook it off.  He knew, now, what it was to be rejected and deserted.  Dombey and Son was no more—­his children no more.

His daughter Florence had married—­married a young sailor once a boy in the office of Dombey and Son—­and thinking of her, Dombey, in the solitude of his dismantled home, remembered that she had never changed to him through all those years; and the mist through which he had seen her, cleared, and showed him her true self.

He wandered through the rooms, and thought of suicide; a guilty hand was grasping what was in his breast.

It was arrested by a cry—­a wild, loud, loving, rapturous cry, and he saw his daughter.

“Papa!  Dearest papa!”

Unchanged still.  Of all the world unchanged.

He tottered to his chair.  He felt her draw his arms about her neck.  He felt her kisses on his face, he felt—­oh, how deeply!—­all that he had done.

She laid his face, now covered with his hands, against the heart that he had almost broken, and said, sobbing, “Papa, love, I am a mother.  Papa, dear, oh, say God bless me and my little child!”

His head, now grey, was encircled by her arm, and he groaned to think that never, never had it rested so before.

“My little child was born at sea, papa.  I prayed to God to spare me that I might come.  The moment I could land I came to you.  Never let us be parted any more, papa!”