"My dear Miss Dombey," said Mr. Toots, stepping forward, "I ’ll explain. She’s the most extraordinary woman. There are not many to equal her! She has always said—she said before we were married, and has said to this day—that whenever you came home, she’d come to you in no dress but the dress she used to serve you in, for fear she might seem strange to you, and you might like her less. I admire the dress myself," said Mr. Toots, "of all things. I adore her in it! My dear Miss Dombey, she ’ll be your maid again, your nurse, all that she ever was, and more. There’s no change in her. But, Susan, my dear," said Mr. Toots, who had spoken with great feeling and high admiration, "all I ask is, that you ’ll remember the medical man, and not exert yourself too much!"
CHAPTER LXI.
RELENTING.
Florence had need of help. Her father’s need of it was sore, and made the aid of her old friend invaluable. Death stood at his pillow. A shade, already, of what he had been, shattered in mind, and perilously sick in body, he laid his weary head down on the bed his daughter’s hands prepared for him, and had never raised it since.
She was always with him. He knew her, generally; though, in the wandering of his brain, he often confused the circumstances under which he spoke to her. Thus he would address her, sometimes, as if his boy were newly dead; and would tell her, that although he had said nothing of her ministering at the little bedside, yet he had seen it—he had seen it; and then would hide his face and sob, and put out his worn hand. Sometimes he would ask her for herself. "Where is Florence?"—"I am here, Papa, I am here." "I don’t know her!" he would cry. "We have been parted so long, that I don’t know her!" and then a staring dread would be upon him, until she could soothe his perturbation; and recal the tears she tried so hard, at other times, to dry.
He rambled through the scenes of his old pursuits—through many where Florence lost him as she listened—sometimes for hours. He would repeat that childish question, "What is money?" and ponder on it, and think about it, and reason with himself, more or less connectedly, for a good answer; as if it had never been proposed to him until that moment. He would go on with a musing repetition of the title of his old firm twenty thousand times, and at every one of them, would turn his head upon his pillow. He would count his children—one—two—stop, and go back, and begin again in the same way.
But this was when his mind was in its most distracted state. In all the other phases of its illness, and in those to which it was most constant, it always turned on Florence. What he would oftenest do was this: he would recal that night he had so recently remembered, the night on which she came down to his room, and would imagine that his heart smote him,
