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!" He kissed her on the lips, and lifting up his eyes, said, "Oh, my God, forgive me, for I need it very much!" * * * * * Great Expectations "Great Expectations," first published as a serial in "All the Year Round," in 1861, is one of Dickens's finest works. It is rounded off so completely and the characters are so admirably drawn that, as a finished work of art, it is hard to say where the genius of its author has surpassed it. If there is less of the exuberance of "Pickwick," there is also less of the characteristic exaggeration of Dickens; and the pathos of the ex-convict's return is far deeper than the pathos of children's death-beds, so frequently exhibited by the author. "Great Expectations," for all its rare qualities, has never achieved the wide popularity of the novels of Charles Dickens that preceded it. We are not generally familiar with any name in the story, as we are with at least one name in all the other novels. Yet, Pip, as a study of child-life, youth, and early manhood, is as excellent as anything in the whole range of English fiction. _I.--In the Marshes_ My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, I called myself with my infant tongue Pip, and came to be called Pip.