Mrs. Clennam, in taking this terrible revenge, cheated herself into believing that she was only the instrument of God, carrying out His will and punishment. But in reality she was satisfying the rage and hatred of her own heart. Year by year she nursed this rage in the gloomy house in which Clennam lived and where he carried on the London branch of his business. It was an old brick house separated from the street by a rusty courtyard. It seemed to have once been about to slide down sidewise, but had been propped up as though it leaned on some half-dozen gigantic crutches. Inside it was dark and miserable, with sunken floors and blackened furniture. In a corner of the sitting-room was an ugly old clock that was wound once a week with an iron handle, and on the walls were pictures showing the "Plagues of Egypt." The only pleasure the grim woman enjoyed was reading aloud from those parts of the Old Testament which call for dreadful punishments to fall upon all the enemies of the righteous, and in these passages she gloried. In this melancholy place the boy Arthur Clennam grew up in silence and in dread, wondering much why they lived so lonely and why his father and mother (for so he thought Mrs. Clennam to be) sat always so silent with faces turned from each other. There were but two servants, an old woman named Affery, and Flintwinch, her husband, a short, bald man, who was both clerk and footman, and who carried his head awry and walked in a one-sided crab-like way, as though he were falling and needed propping up like the house. Flintwinch was cunning and without conscience. Very few secrets his mistress had which he did not know, and they often quarreled. At length the uncle, who had compelled the unhappy marriage of Arthur's father, died. Feeling sorry at the last for the wretched singer, whose life had been ruined, he left her in his will a sum of money, and another sum to the youngest niece of the man who had befriended and educated her--Mr. Dorrit. This money, however, Mrs. Clennam did not intend either the woman she hated or the niece of her patron should get. She hid the part of the will which referred to it, and made Flintwinch (who, beside her husband, was the only one who knew of it) promise not to tell. Arthur's father she compelled to sail to China, to take charge of the branch of his business in that country, and when Arthur was old enough, she sent him there also. For twenty years, while Arthur stayed with his father on the other side of the world, Mrs. Clennam, cold and unforgiving as ever, lived on in the old, tumbling house, carrying on the London business with the aid of Flintwinch. The poor, forsaken singer lost her mind and at last died. Mr. Dorrit, of course, knowing nothing about the hidden will, could not claim his share, and the guilty secret remained (except for Arthur's unhappy father) in possession of only Mrs. Clennam and the crafty Flintwinch.