Being allowed to purchase the
means of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such time
as the prison lamps should be extinguished.
He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known
nothing of her father's imprisonment, until he had heard of it from
herself, and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father's and
uncle's responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been read.
He had already explained to her that his concealment from herself of
the name he had relinquished, was the one condition--fully
intelligible now--that her father had attached to their betrothal,
and was the one promise he had still exacted on the morning of their
marriage. He entreated her, for her father's sake, never to seek to
know whether her father had become oblivious of the existence of the
paper, or had had it recalled to him (for the moment, or for good),
by the story of the Tower, on that old Sunday under the dear old
plane-tree in the garden. If he had preserved any definite remembrance
of it, there could be no doubt that he had supposed it destroyed with
the Bastille, when he had found no mention of it among the relics of
prisoners which the populace had discovered there, and which had been
described to all the world.
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