being come for the renewal of his acquaintance with the Meagles family,
Clennam, pursuant to contract made between himself and Mr. Meagles, within the
precincts of Bleeding Heart Yard, turned his face on a certain Saturday towards
Twickenham, where Mr. Meagles had a cottage-residence of his own. The weather
being fine and dry, and any English road abounding in interest for him who had
been so long away, he sent his valise on by the coach, and set out to walk. A
walk was in itself a new enjoyment to him, and one that had rarely diversified
his life afar off.
    He went by Fulham and Putney, for the pleasure of strolling over the heath.
It was bright and shining there; and when he found himself so far on his road to
Twickenham, he found himself a long way on his road to a number of airier and
less substantial destinations. They had risen before him fast, in the healthful
exercise and the pleasant road. It is not easy to walk alone in the country
without musing upon something. And he had plenty of unsettled subjects to
meditate upon, though he had been walking to the Land's End.
    First, there was the subject seldom absent from his mind, the question, what
he was to do henceforth in life; to what occupation he should devote himself,
and in what direction he had best seek it. He was far from rich, and every day
of indecision and inaction made his inheritance a source of greater anxiety to
him. As often as he began to consider how to increase this inheritance, or to
lay it by, so often his misgiving that there was some one with an unsatisfied
claim upon his justice, returned; and that alone was a subject to outlast the
longest walk. Again, there was the subject of his relations with his mother,
which were now upon an equable and peaceful but never confidential footing, and
whom he saw several times a-week. Little Dorrit was a leading and a constant
subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of her own story,
presented the little creature to him as the only person between whom and himself
there were ties of innocent reliance on one hand, and affectionate protection on
the other; ties of compassion, respect, unselfish interest, gratitude, and pity.
Thinking of her, and of the possibility of her father's release from prison by
the unbarring hand of death - the only change of circumstance he could foresee
that might enable him to be such a friend to her as he wished to be, by altering
her whole