But the last item was long, long, long, in linking itself to the rest.

The novelty of the place, the coming upon it without preparation, the sense of being locked up, the remembrance of that room up-stairs, of the two brothers, and above all of the retiring childish form, and the face in which he now saw years of insufficient food, if not of want, kept him waking and unhappy.
Speculations, too, bearing the strangest relations towards the prison, but always concerning the prison, ran like nightmares through his mind while he lay awake.

Whether coffins were kept ready for people who might die there, where they were kept, how they were kept, where people who died in the prison were buried, how they were taken out, what forms were observed, whether an implacable creditor could arrest the dead?
As to escaping, what chances there were of escape?
Whether a prisoner could scale the walls with a cord and grapple, how he would descend upon the other side?
whether he could alight on a housetop, steal down a staircase, let himself out at a door, and get lost in the crowd?
As to Fire in the prison, if one were to break out while he lay there?
And these involuntary starts of fancy were, after all, but the setting of a picture in which three people kept before him.

His father, with the steadfast look with which he had died, prophetically darkened forth in the portrait; his mother, with her arm up, warding off his suspicion; Little Dorrit, with her hand on the degraded arm, and her drooping head turned away.
What if his mother had an old reason she well knew for softening to this poor girl! What if the prisoner now sleeping quietly--Heaven grant it!--by the light of the great Day of judgment should trace back his fall to her.

What if any act of hers and of his father's, should have even remotely brought the grey heads of those two brothers so low! A swift thought shot into his mind.