Great Expectations

Charles Dickens's 1861 novel traces the life of Philip Pirrip—"Pip"—from his terrified childhood on the Kent marshes through his transformation into a London gentleman and the shattering revelation of who truly made his fortune. It is at once a mystery, a bildungsroman, and a meditation on class, guilt, loyalty, and the corrosive effects of snobbery, told in Pip's own rueful, wiser voice looking back on the boy he was.

Narrative Note

The novel is narrated retrospectively in the first person by Pip himself, an older and chastened man recounting his younger self's delusions, cruelties, and slow moral awakening. The three-stage structure mirrors the three phases of his expectations.

Cast of Characters

• Pip (Philip Pirrip) — the narrator; orphan, blacksmith's apprentice, then a gentleman of great expectations
• Joe Gargery — the village blacksmith, Pip's brother-in-law; gentle, loyal, and wholly good
• Mrs. Joe Gargery — Pip's fierce, sharp-tempered elder sister who raises him "by hand"
• Abel Magwitch (Provis) — an escaped convict Pip helps as a child; secretly his benefactor
• Miss Havisham — a wealthy recluse of Satis House, jilted on her wedding day, who raises Estella to break men's hearts
• Estella — Miss Havisham's adopted daughter; beautiful, proud, and cold; Pip's great love
• Mr. Jaggers — a powerful London criminal lawyer; Pip's guardian
• Herbert Pocket (the pale young gentleman) — Pip's closest friend and roommate in London
• Biddy — an orphan from Pip's village; kind, wise, and perceptive; eventually marries Joe
• Compeyson — a gentleman-criminal who jilted Miss Havisham and betrayed Magwitch
• Bentley Drummle (the Spider) — a sulky, brutal young gentleman who marries Estella
• Wemmick — Jaggers's clerk, split between his professional hardness and his tender home life at the Castle
• Orlick — Joe's surly journeyman; violent and vengeful
• Molly — Jaggers's housekeeper; revealed to be Estella's mother
• Matthew Pocket — Pip's tutor; Miss Havisham's cousin, an amiable, impractical scholar
• Uncle Pumblechook — Joe's uncle; a pompous corn-chandler who claims credit for Pip's rise

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The First Stage of Pip's Expectations

Chapter I.

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name on the authority of his tombstone and my sister—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. I never saw my father or mother, and my first fancies regarding them were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair. To five little stone lozenges beside their grave, sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early, I am indebted for a belief that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, twenty miles of the sea. My first vivid impression of the identity of things was gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening, when I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; that the dark flat wilderness beyond was the marshes; that the low leaden line was the river; that the distant savage lair from which the wind rushed was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg—who had been soaked in water, smothered in mud, lamed by stones, cut by flints, and stung by nettles; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered as he seized me by the chin.

He turned me upside down and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread, which he ate ravenously. Then, tilting me back upon a tombstone, he demanded whether I knew what a file was, and what wittles was, tilting me further with each question. "You get me a file. And you get me wittles. Or I'll have your heart and liver out."

He told me of a young man hid with him, in comparison with whom he was an Angel—a young man with a secret way of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. I promised to bring the file and food to the old Battery early next morning, and he limped away towards the low church wall, hugging his shuddering body as if to hold himself together. As I watched him go, picking his way among the nettles and brambles, he looked as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people stretching up from their graves. The man was limping towards the gibbet, as if he were the pirate come to life and going back to hook himself up again. I ran home without stopping.

Chapter II.

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation because she had brought me up "by hand." Knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. Joe was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

When I ran home from the churchyard, Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen. "Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she's out now, making it a baker's dozen." Worse still, she had Tickler with her—a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame.

She burst in, applied Tickler to me, and threw me at Joe, who quietly fenced me up in the chimney corner with his great leg. "Where have you been, you young monkey?" she demanded. I said I had only been to the churchyard. "If it warn't for me you'd have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?"

Though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice of bread and butter, needing to save it for my dreadful acquaintance. I resolved to put it down the leg of my trousers. Joe, alarmed at my apparently bolting the food whole, tried to warn me: "Pip, old chap! You'll do yourself a mischief. It'll stick somewhere." Mrs. Joe, desperate for an explanation, pounced on Joe and knocked his head against the wall. Then she dosed me with Tar-water—a pint of it poured down my throat while she held my head under her arm like a boot in a bootjack.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe—I never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the housekeeping property as his—united to the necessity of always keeping one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding. The guns were firing on the marshes—another convict off. Mrs. Joe informed me that the Hulks were prison-ships, and that people were put there because they murder and rob, "and they always begin by asking questions. Now, you get along to bed!"

I went upstairs in the dark, feeling fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the Hulks were handy for me. I had begun by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

As soon as the black velvet pall outside my window was shot with grey, I crept downstairs—every board calling after me, "Stop thief!"—and raided the pantry: bread, cheese, mincemeat, brandy from the stone bottle (diluted with water from the kitchen jug), a meat bone, and a beautiful round compact pork pie. I got a file from among Joe's tools in the forge, and ran for the misty marshes.

Chapter III.

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. The marsh mist was so thick that everything seemed to run at me—very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes came bursting through the mist crying, "A boy with somebody else's pork pie! Stop him!" One black ox with a white cravat on, who had something of a clerical air, fixed me so accusingly that I blubbered out, "I couldn't help it, sir! It wasn't for myself I took it!"

In the confusion of the mist I found myself too far to the right, and had to try back along the river-side. Near the Battery, I scrambled up a mound and saw a man sitting with his back to me, arms folded, nodding with sleep. I touched him on the shoulder. He jumped up—and it was not the same man, but another! Dressed in coarse grey too, with a great iron on his leg, lame and hoarse and cold—but with a different face and a flat broad-brimmed hat. He swore at me, made a weak blow that missed, and stumbled off into the mist.

"It's the young man!" I thought, feeling my heart shoot.

I was soon at the Battery, and there was the right man—hugging himself and limping to and fro, awfully cold and awfully hungry. He did not turn me upside down this time but left me right side upwards while I opened my bundle. He was handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious manner—more like a man putting it away somewhere in a violent hurry than eating it. He shivered so violently he could barely keep the brandy bottle between his teeth.

He ate like a large dog of ours—strong sharp sudden bites, snapping up every mouthful too soon and too fast, looking sideways as if somebody might come to take the pie away. When I timidly mentioned the young man, and that I had seen him nodding asleep nearby, the convict stopped eating and stared at me with the keenest scrutiny.

"Dressed like you, only with a hat," I explained, trembling, "and with—the same reason for wanting to borrow a file."

At this news he crammed what food was left into his jacket. "Show me the way he went. I'll pull him down, like a bloodhound." Then he was down on the wet grass, filing at his iron like a madman, not minding his own bloody, chafed leg. I told him I must go, but he took no notice. The last I saw, his head was bent over his knee, working hard at his fetter. The last I heard, the file was still going.

Chapter IV.

I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, but no discovery had been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy getting the house ready for Christmas, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan.

We were to have a superb dinner—pickled pork and greens, roast stuffed fowls, mince-pie, and pudding. Joe and I went to church in our Sunday penitentials while Mrs. Joe stayed home to prepare. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the terrible young man.

The company came: Mr. Wopsle the clerk, with his Roman nose and deep voice; Mr. and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing man with a mouth like a fish and sandy hair standing upright. Every Christmas Day he presented himself with exactly the same words, carrying two bottles like dumb-bells.

They wouldn't leave me alone at dinner. I might have been an unfortunate little bull in a Spanish arena, so smartingly was I touched up by their moral goads. "Be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand," said Pumblechook. "Why is it that the young are never grateful?" asked Mrs. Hubble. "Naterally wicious," solved Mr. Hubble. Joe's only comfort was to spoon gravy into my plate.

Mr. Pumblechook lectured me on what would have happened had I been born a four-footed Squeaker—Dunstable the butcher would have shed my blood and had my life. "No bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of it!" Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

Then my sister offered Pumblechook brandy. O Heavens, it had come at last! I held tight to the leg of the table and awaited my fate. He trifled with his glass, threw his head back, and drank it off. Instantly he sprang to his feet in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance, rushing out the door. He was brought back gasping the single word: "Tar!" I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug.

Pumblechook waved it all away and asked for hot gin and water. For the time being, I was saved. By degrees I became calm enough to partake of pudding. But then my sister said, "Clean plates,—cold." I clutched the table leg again, for I foresaw what was coming.

"You must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious present of Uncle Pumblechook's! It's a pie; a savory pork pie."

My sister went to the pantry. I saw Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in the Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I felt I could bear no more, and ran for my life.

But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, "Here you are, look sharp, come on!"

Chapter V.

The soldiers' arrival caused the dinner-party to rise in confusion, and Mrs. Joe, re-entering empty-handed, to stop short: "Gracious goodness gracious me, what's gone—with the—pie!"

But the handcuffs were not for me. The sergeant wanted the blacksmith—a lock on one pair had gone wrong. Joe pronounced the job would take nearer two hours than one, and set about it at once on his Majesty's service. While the forge roared, the company enjoyed themselves tremendously—Pumblechook handing about the wine with great liberality, the sergeant flattering him as "a man that knows what's what." I thought what terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was.

When Joe's job was done, he proposed that some of us go down with the soldiers. Mrs. Joe's curiosity won us leave, with the stipulation: "If you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don't look to me to put it together again."

Out on the marshes, with Joe carrying me on his back, I dreaded that my convict would think I had brought the soldiers. We struck out across the open flats under the low red glare of sunset. Then we all stopped—a long shout had reached us on the wind. The sergeant ordered his men towards it at the double. It was a run indeed, what Joe called "a Winder." We could hear one voice calling "Murder!" and another, "Convicts! Runaways! Guard!"

The sergeant ran in first. "Here are both men!" he panted, struggling at the bottom of a ditch. They dragged out, separately, my convict and the other one—both bleeding and panting.

"I took him! I give him up to you!" said my convict. He declared he could have got clear of the marshes but had stayed to prevent the other man escaping. "He's a gentleman, if you please, this villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me."

The other convict, livid and shaking, gasped, "He tried to murder me."

"He lies!" said my convict with fierce energy. "He's a liar born, and he'll die a liar."

As the torches were lit, my convict looked round and saw me for the first time. I slightly moved my hands and shook my head, trying to assure him of my innocence. He gave me a look I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment.

We marched to a rough hut at a landing-place. There, my convict suddenly spoke: "I wish to say something. A man can't starve. I took some wittles, up at the willage over yonder—from the blacksmith's."

"Halloa!" said the sergeant, staring at Joe. "Halloa, Pip!" said Joe, staring at me.

"So you're the blacksmith, are you? Than I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie."

"God knows you're welcome to it," returned Joe. "We wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.—Would us, Pip?"

Something clicked in the man's throat, and he turned his back. We saw him put into the boat and rowed to the black Hulk lying out from the shore like a wicked Noah's ark, cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains. The ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.

Chapter VI.

My unexpected exoneration did not impel me to frank disclosure. I loved Joe, and it was much upon my mind that I ought to tell him the whole truth. Yet I did not, for I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe's confidence tied up my tongue. I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

Joe carried me home on his back. The visitors were suggesting different ways the convict had got into the pantry. Pumblechook made out that he had got upon the roof and let himself down the chimney by a rope of bedding cut into strips; and as Pumblechook was very positive and drove his own chaise-cart—over everybody—it was agreed that it must be so.

Chapter VII.

My education was conducted at Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's evening school—that is to say, a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity who slept from six to seven every evening while youth paid twopence per week for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it. Biddy, her granddaughter—an orphan like myself, brought up by hand—arranged the shop transactions and helped me more than anyone. I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush, and at last began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher on the very smallest scale.

One winter night, about a year after the hunt on the marshes, I sat in the chimney corner producing a letter to Joe: "MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN BLEVE ME INF XN PIP."

Joe received it as a miracle of erudition. "What a scholar you are! An't you?" He could find nothing in it but J's and O's—"J-O, Joe"—and confessed he didn't spell Gargery at all. "Tho' I'm uncommon fond of reading, too. When you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"

Joe's education, like Steam, was yet in its infancy. He told me why. His father was given to drink, and when overtook with drink, hammered away at Joe's mother most onmerciful—and at Joe himself. Whenever his mother ran away and put Joe to school, his father would come with a tremendous crowd and make such a row that they were given up to him. "And then he took us home and hammered us. Which, you see, Pip, were a drawback on my learning."

Yet Joe insisted his father "were that good in his hart." He had composed a couplet for the tombstone: "Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his heart." But poetry costs money, and it were not done.

After his parents died, Joe got acquainted with my sister. "When I offered to your sister to keep company, I said to her, 'And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child, there's room for him at the forge!'"

I broke out crying and hugged Joe round the neck. "Ever the best of friends; an't us, Pip? Don't cry, old chap!"

Joe explained why my education of him must be done on the sly: "Your sister is given to government." "Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea that Joe had divorced her in favour of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury. "Given to government," said Joe. "Which I meantersay the government of you and myself." She wouldn't be partial to his being a scholar, for fear he might rise. And he endured her tyranny because he had seen so much of his poor mother drudging and slaving that he was "dead afeerd of going wrong in the way of not doing what's right by a woman."

Young as I was, I dated a new admiration of Joe from that night.

That evening Mrs. Joe returned from market-day with Uncle Pumblechook, bursting with news. "If this boy ain't grateful this night, he never will be!" Miss Havisham—the immensely rich and grim lady who lived in seclusion up town—wanted this boy to go and play there. Pumblechook, being her tenant, had mentioned me. He would take me into town tonight and deliver me to Miss Havisham tomorrow morning.

My sister pounced upon me like an eagle on a lamb—I was soaped, kneaded, towelled, thumped, and trussed up in my tightest suit. I was delivered over to Pumblechook, who let off his speech: "Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but especially unto them which brought you up by hand!"

"Good-bye, Joe!" "God bless you, Pip, old chap!"

I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart.

Chapter VIII.

Mr. Pumblechook's premises were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character. I breakfasted with him in wretched company—his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic. "Seven times nine, boy?" And before I had swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through breakfast, while he sat at his ease eating bacon and hot roll in a gorging and gormandizing manner.

We came to Miss Havisham's house—old brick, dismal, with a great many iron bars. A young lady came across the courtyard with keys. "This is Pip, is it?" she returned, very pretty and very proud. When Pumblechook tried to come in too, she stopped him with the gate. "Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?" "Ah! but you see she don't." He departed, eying me severely, as if I had done anything to him.

The girl told me the house was called Satis—meaning "enough." "Whoever had this house could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think." Though she called me "boy" so often, she was about my own age—but beautiful and self-possessed, as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.

She led me through dark passages by candlelight to a room door. "Go in." "After you, miss." "Don't be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in." And she scornfully walked away—and took the candle with her.

I knocked and entered a large room lit with wax candles, no glimpse of daylight. There sat the strangest lady I have ever seen. She was dressed in rich materials—satins, lace, silks—all of white. Her shoes were white. She had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Everything that ought to be white had been white long ago, and was faded and yellow. The bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. The figure upon which the dress now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone.

Her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

"Look at me," said Miss Havisham. "You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?" She laid her hands on her left side. "What do I touch?" "Your heart." "Broken!"

"I am tired," she said. "I want diversion, and I have done with men and women. Play." She called for Estella, who came along the dark passage like a star. Miss Havisham tried a jewel against her pretty brown hair. "Let me see you play cards with this boy."

"With this boy? Why, he is a common labouring-boy!"

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer: "Well? You can break his heart."

"Beggar him," said Miss Havisham. So we sat down to cards. Everything in the room had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. She sat corpse-like as we played, the frillings on her bridal dress looking like earthy paper.

"He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!" said Estella with disdain. "And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!" Her contempt was so strong it became infectious, and I caught it.

Miss Havisham asked what I thought of Estella. I whispered: "I think she is very proud. I think she is very pretty. I think she is very insulting. I think I should like to go home."

Estella beggared me and threw the cards down as if she despised them for having been won of me. Miss Havisham told me to come again after six days.

Estella brought me bread and meat and beer, putting the mug down on the stones as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. Tears started to my eyes, and the girl looked at me with a quick delight in having caused them. When she was gone, I got behind a gate in the brewery-lane and cried, kicking the wall and twisting my hair. In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.

In the deserted brewery, a strange thing happened to my fancy. I saw a figure hanging by the neck from a great wooden beam—all in yellow white, with but one shoe, and the face was Miss Havisham's. In terror I ran from it, then towards it—and found no figure there.

Estella let me out. "Why don't you cry?" "Because I don't want to." "You do. You have been crying till you are half blind." She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate. I walked the four miles home, deeply revolving that I was a common labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks.

Chapter IX.

When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss Havisham's, and I soon found myself getting heavily bumped and having my face shoved against the kitchen wall, because I did not answer her questions at sufficient length. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as my eyes had seen it, I should not be understood—there would be something coarse and treacherous in dragging her as she really was before the contemplation of Mrs. Joe.

Pumblechook came gaping over at tea-time, preyed upon by devouring curiosity. The mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end, made me vicious in my reticence. He put me through my pence-table, then demanded, "Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?" "Very tall and dark," I told him. He winked assent—from which I inferred he had never seen her, for she was nothing of the kind.

Then, perfectly frantic—a reckless witness under the torture—I told them Miss Havisham sat in a black velvet coach, that Estella handed in cake and wine on gold plates, that four immense dogs fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver basket, and that we played with flags and waved swords. "And I saw pistols in it,—and jam,—and pills." Pumblechook gravely confirmed what little he could. If they had asked me any more questions, I should undoubtedly have betrayed myself, for I was on the point of mentioning a balloon in the yard.

They debated what Miss Havisham would "do" for me. My sister stood out for "property." Pumblechook favoured a handsome premium for binding me to some genteel trade—say, the corn and seed trade. Joe fell into the deepest disgrace for suggesting I might only be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the veal-cutlets.

When Joe came in and heard these marvels, his blue eyes rolled all round the kitchen in helpless amazement, and I was overtaken by penitence—but only as regarded him. That night I stole into the forge and confessed: "It's a terrible thing, Joe; it ain't true."

"But not all of it? Why sure you don't mean to say, Pip, that there was no black welwet co—eh?" I stood shaking my head. "But at least there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip, if there warn't no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?"

"No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind."

I told him I felt miserable, that a beautiful young lady had said I was common, and that the lies had come of it somehow. Joe vanquished the metaphysics simply: "Lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't ought to come. That ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're oncommon small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar."

"If you can't get to be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and live well and die happy."

Yet when I got to my little room, my young mind was in that disturbed state that I thought long how common Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and how coarse his hands. That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Chapter X.

I resolved that the best step towards making myself uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew. She immediately agreed and began within five minutes.

One Saturday evening I went to fetch Joe from the Three Jolly Bargemen and found him smoking his pipe with Mr. Wopsle and a stranger—a secret-looking man with his head all on one side and one eye half shut, as if taking aim with an invisible gun. He asked pointed questions about the marshes and convicts, and about me—"He's a likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?"

Mr. Wopsle expounded the ties between me and Joe, finishing off with a terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third. All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, as if determined to have a shot at me at last. Then he made his extraordinary shot: he stirred his rum and water not with a spoon, but with a file.

Nobody but I saw the file. He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe's file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally about turnips.

As we left, the stranger gave me a shilling folded in crumpled paper. At home, the paper proved to contain two one-pound notes. Joe ran back to restore them, but the man was gone. My sister sealed them in an ornamental teapot in the state parlour. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many a night and day. I was haunted by the file too—a dread possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would reappear.

Chapter XI.

On my second visit, Estella led me to a different part of the house, to a gloomy room where I found three ladies and a gentleman waiting with a listless and dreary air. They were all toadies and humbugs, each pretending not to know the others were the same. Camilla, who reminded me of my sister, lamented at length about her sufferings on Miss Havisham's behalf—the ginger and sal volatile she took in the night, the nervous jerkings in her legs, the chokings. "Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs." Her husband consoled her that her family feelings were "gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other." Miss Sarah Pocket, a little dry corrugated old woman with a walnut-shell face and a large mouth like a cat's without the whiskers, and Georgiana completed the party.

Miss Havisham set me to walking her round and round a great room where a long table stood spread as if for a feast that had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. Everything was covered with dust and mould and dropping to pieces. An epergne in the middle was so overhung with cobwebs its form was undistinguishable, and speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies ran in and out of it. Mice rattled behind the panels. Black beetles groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way.

"This is where I will be laid when I am dead," she said, pointing with her crutch-headed stick. "What do you think that is, where those cobwebs are? It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!"

"Come, come, come! Walk me, walk me!" So I walked Miss Havisham round and round, and she leaned upon my shoulder, twitching her hand and working her mouth, going fast because her thoughts went fast.

The visitors were brought up, and we posted on round and round while they fawned. Camilla went on about Matthew, who never came to see Miss Havisham, and how she herself had taken to the sofa with her staylace cut and lain there hours insensible. Miss Havisham stopped and assigned them their stations at the table for when she was dead: "That will be his place—there, at my head! And yours will be there! And your husband's there! And Sarah Pocket's there! Now you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me. And now go!"

In the dark passage, Estella stopped suddenly, her face quite close to mine. "Am I pretty?" "Yes; I think you are very pretty." "Am I insulting?" "Not so much so as you were last time." She slapped my face with such force as she had. "Now? You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?" "I shall not tell you." "Why don't you cry again, you little wretch?" "Because I'll never cry for you again," said I—as false a declaration as ever was made, for I was inwardly crying for her then.

Going upstairs, we met a burly man of exceedingly dark complexion, with a large head and bushy black eyebrows that stood up bristling, and eyes disagreeably sharp and suspicious. He took my chin in his large hand. "Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows." His hand smelt of scented soap. He was nothing to me then, and I could have had no foresight that he ever would be anything to me.

It was Miss Havisham's birthday, though she would not suffer it to be spoken of. "On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me." She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure lying there—she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything in a state to crumble under a touch.

We played cards again—I was beggared, as before. Afterwards, wandering the wilderness of the garden, I found myself exchanging a broad stare through a window with a pale young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair.

"Halloa!" said he. "Come and fight."

What could I do but follow him? He pulled off his jacket, waistcoat, and shirt in a manner at once light-hearted, business-like, and bloodthirsty, and squared at me with every demonstration of mechanical nicety, eyeing my anatomy as if minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life as when I let out the first blow and saw him lying on his back with a bloody nose. But he was on his feet directly, sponging himself and squaring again. He seemed to have no strength, and never once hit me hard, and was always knocked down; but he came up again and again and again, until at last he threw up his sponge: "That means you have won."

His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed so brave and innocent that I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory.

When I got into the courtyard, Estella was waiting with a bright flush on her face, as though something had happened to delight her. She stepped back into the passage and beckoned me. "Come here! You may kiss me, if you like." I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. But I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing.

Chapter XII.

My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman. I felt his blood was on my head and that the Law would avenge it. For some days I kept close at home, lest the officers of the County Jail should pounce upon me. The pale young gentleman's nose had stained my trousers, and I tried to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the dead of night.

But when I returned to Miss Havisham's, nothing came of the late struggle. No pale young gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. Only in the corner where the combat had taken place could I detect traces of his gore, and I covered them with garden-mould from the eye of man.

I entered on a regular occupation of pushing Miss Havisham in a wheeled chair round and round her rooms, every alternate day, for a period of eight or ten months. She talked more to me as we grew used to one another, asking what I had learnt and what I was going to be. I told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, and enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting to know everything, hoping she might offer some help. But she did not; she seemed to prefer my being ignorant. She never gave me money or anything but my daily dinner.

Estella was always about—sometimes coldly tolerating me, sometimes condescending, sometimes telling me energetically that she hated me. Miss Havisham would ask in a whisper, "Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?" and seem to enjoy it greedily, murmuring to Estella something that sounded like "Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!"

One day Miss Havisham suddenly said, "Sing!" and I was surprised into crooning the forge song Old Clem as I pushed her over the floor. It caught her fancy, and she took it up in a low brooding voice as if singing in her sleep. After that, Estella would often join in, though the whole strain was so subdued it made less noise in the grim old house than the lightest breath of wind.

I told poor Biddy everything, but reposed complete confidence in no one else. Meanwhile, Pumblechook and my sister held councils in the kitchen about my prospects, speculating what Miss Havisham would "do" for me. That ass Pumblechook would drag me from my stool and put me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked: "Now, Mum, here is this boy which you brought up by hand!"

Then one day Miss Havisham said with displeasure, "You are growing tall, Pip!" and shortly after: "You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with you, and bring your indentures?" When I delivered this message, my sister went on the Rampage to a terrible extent—threw a candlestick at Joe, got out the dustpan, and cleaned us out of house and home so that we stood shivering in the back-yard.

Chapter XIII.

Joe arrayed himself in his Sunday clothes, looking more like a scarecrow in good circumstances than anything else, pulling up his shirt-collar so high behind that the hair on his crown stood up like a tuft of feathers. Throughout the interview with Miss Havisham, he persisted in addressing me instead of her.

"Which I meantersay, Pip, as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time what you might call a single man."

"Has the boy ever made any objection? Does he like the trade?" asked Miss Havisham.

"Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip, that it were the wish of your own hart!"

He took the indentures from his hat—"Well, Pip, you know, you yourself see me put 'em in my 'at, and therefore you know as they are here"—and gave them, not to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow—I know I was ashamed of him—when I saw that Estella stood at the back of Miss Havisham's chair, and that her eyes laughed mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to Miss Havisham.

Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there.

Miss Havisham gave a bag of five-and-twenty guineas as Pip's premium. "Good-bye, Pip! Gargery is your master now." She called Joe back: "The boy has been a good boy here, and that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no other and no more."

Outside, Joe backed up against a wall and said, "Astonishing!" so many times I began to think his senses were never coming back. On the way to Pumblechook's, Joe invented a subtle design—telling my sister that Miss Havisham sent her compliments, wished she could have the pleasure of ladies' company, and had given the money to Mrs. J. Gargery specifically. Joe built up the sum gradually—"What would present company say to ten pound?" "It's more than that, then." That fearful Impostor Pumblechook echoed every revelation as if he had known all about it beforehand.

I was pushed over to the Town Hall and bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial presence. Pumblechook shoved me before him as if I had picked a pocket—indeed, the general impression in Court was that I had been taken red-handed. A most melancholy day I passed at the celebratory dinner, where I was an excrescence on the entertainment, and Pumblechook placed me standing on a chair to illustrate his remarks.

When I got into my little bedroom, I was truly wretched, and had a strong conviction that I should never like Joe's trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.

Chapter XIV.

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it—believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon, in the front door as a mysterious portal, in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.

The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done. It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away. Any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me. What I dreaded was that in some unlucky hour, being at my grimiest and commonest, I should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge, with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me.

Chapter XV.

My education under Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt terminated, Biddy having imparted to me everything she knew. Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe—not from virtue, I must confess, but because I wanted to make him less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society and less open to Estella's reproach. The old Battery on the marshes was our place of study, with a broken slate and a short piece of slate-pencil for educational implements, to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to remember anything from one Sunday to another, yet he would smoke his pipe there with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else, as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely.

It was pleasant and quiet out there, with the sails on the river passing beyond the earthwork. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and Estella; they appeared to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.

I proposed visiting Miss Havisham. Joe was doubtful—"She might think you wanted something, expected something of her." He harped at length on the unsuitability of various presents: a door-chain, shark-headed screws, a toasting-fork, a gridiron. "A gridiron IS a gridiron, and you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave, and you can't help yourself."

Joe kept a journeyman named Orlick—a broad-shouldered swarthy fellow of great strength, always slouching, who would slouch in and out like Cain or the Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes. This morose journeyman had no liking for me; he always beat his sparks in my direction, and whenever I sang Old Clem, he came in out of time.

When I asked for a half-holiday, Orlick demanded one too. The master refusing until the journeyman was in a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot bar, made at me with it as if to run it through my body, whisked it round my head, and hammered it out—as if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood. My sister, overhearing from the yard, called Joe a fool for giving holidays to "great idle hulkers." Orlick called her "a foul shrew, Mother Gargery." She worked herself into a frenzy by regular stages—clappings and screamings, beating her hands upon her bosom, throwing her cap off and pulling her hair down. Joe stood up to Orlick, and they went at one another like two giants. Orlick was very soon among the coal-dust. Joe's parting observation as I set off: "On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip:—such is Life!"

At Miss Havisham's, Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella. Miss Havisham was alone and unchanged. "I hope you want nothing? You'll get nothing." I said I only wanted her to know I was doing well in my apprenticeship. "You are looking round for Estella? Hey?" She was abroad, educating for a lady, far out of reach, prettier than ever, admired by all who see her. "Do you feel that you have lost her?" There was such malignant enjoyment in her words that I was at a loss what to say. I felt more than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with everything.

That evening, Mr. Wopsle dragged me to Pumblechook's to hear the tragedy of George Barnwell. What stung me was the identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When Barnwell began to go wrong, Pumblechook's indignant stare so taxed me with it. Even after I was happily hanged, Pumblechook sat staring at me: "Take warning, boy, take warning!"

Walking home in the dark and mist with Wopsle and Orlick, the guns were going again—more convicts escaped from the Hulks. We came to the village to find the Three Jolly Bargemen in commotion. "There's something wrong up at your place, Pip. Run all!"

We ran to our kitchen, full of people—the whole village was there. There was a surgeon, and there was Joe, and there on the bare boards lay my sister—knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire—destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was the wife of Joe.

Chapter XVI.

She had been struck with something blunt and heavy on the head and spine. On the ground beside her lay a convict's leg-iron which had been filed asunder. Knowing what I knew, I believed it to be my convict's iron—the iron I had seen him filing at on the marshes—but my mind did not accuse him of having put it to its latest use. I suspected either Orlick or the strange man who had shown me the file. But Orlick had been seen about town all evening, and there was nothing definite against the stranger either.

It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however undesignedly. I suffered unspeakable trouble considering whether to tell Joe the whole story, but the secret had so grown into me and become a part of myself that I could not tear it away.

The Constables and the Bow Street men were about the house for a week or two. They took up several obviously wrong people, ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and stood about the door of the Jolly Bargemen with knowing looks that filled the neighbourhood with admiration. But they never took the culprit.

My sister lay very ill. Her sight was disturbed, her hearing impaired, her memory gone, her speech unintelligible. When at last she came round enough to be helped downstairs, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living, and Biddy became a part of our establishment—a blessing to the household, and above all to Joe, who was sadly cut up by the constant contemplation of the wreck of his wife.

Biddy solved a mystery that had baffled me. My sister kept tracing a character on her slate that looked like a curious T. I had tried everything from tar to toast. Biddy recognized it as a hammer—Orlick's sign. "Why, of course! Don't you see? It's him!" But when Orlick was brought in, my sister showed not accusation but the greatest anxiety to be on good terms with him, with an air of humble propitiation like a child towards a hard master. After that day, she rarely passed a day without drawing the hammer on her slate.

Chapter XVII.

I fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship, visiting Miss Havisham annually on my birthday, receiving a guinea each time. So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place.

Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy. Her shoes came up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands were always clean. She was not beautiful—she was common, and could not be like Estella—but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered, with curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes that were very pretty and very good. She managed our whole domestic life wonderfully, and whatever I knew, Biddy knew. Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or better.

One Sunday, walking on the marshes by the river, I confided to Biddy: "I want to be a gentleman."

"O, I wouldn't, if I was you! Don't you think you are happier as you are?"

"I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life."

I confessed it was all on account of the beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's—"she's more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account."

"Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?" Biddy asked quietly. "Because, if it is to spite her, that might be better done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, she was not worth gaining over."

Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day? Biddy put her comfortable hand upon mine and gently took my fingers out of my hair. She softly patted my shoulder while I cried a little.

"If I could only get myself to fall in love with you," I said, "that would be the thing for me."

"But you never will, you see," said Biddy, decisively.

Near the churchyard, Old Orlick started up from the sluice-gate. Biddy whispered, "Don't let him come; I don't like him." Why? "Because I am afraid he likes me. He dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye."

I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbour by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, "Pip, what a fool you are!"

All that Biddy said seemed right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me pain. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?

My mind was confused enough before, but I complicated it fifty thousand-fold by having seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the plain honest working life had nothing to be ashamed of—and then some confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon me like a destructive missile and scatter my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune when my time was out.

Chapter XVIII.

It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship, a Saturday night at the Three Jolly Bargemen, where Mr. Wopsle was reading aloud about a popular murder with great relish. A strange gentleman leaning over the settle opposite me watched with an expression of contempt, biting the side of a great forefinger. When the reading was done, he demolished Wopsle with merciless cross-examination about the presumption of innocence, throwing his finger at him like a weapon, until we were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too far.

I recognised him as the gentleman I had met on the stairs at Miss Havisham's—the large head, dark complexion, deep-set eyes, bushy black eyebrows, large watch-chain, and even the smell of scented soap on his great hand.

"From information I have received, I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith among you, by name Joseph—or Joe—Gargery. Which is the man?" And: "You have an apprentice, commonly known as Pip? Is he here?"

We three walked home in wondering silence. In the state parlour, feebly lighted by one candle, the stranger began:

"My name is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you. Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for so doing?"

"Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip's way," said Joe, staring.

"Now, I return to this young fellow. The communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations."

Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.

"He will come into a handsome property. It is the desire of the present possessor of that property that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and be brought up as a gentleman—in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations."

My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.

"Now, Mr. Pip," pursued the lawyer, "I address the rest of what I have to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear the name of Pip."

My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears, that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.

"You are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret, until the person chooses to reveal it. I am empowered to mention that it is the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by word of mouth to yourself. When or where that intention may be carried out, I cannot say; no one can say. It may be years hence. Now, you are distinctly to understand that you are most positively prohibited from making any inquiry on this head. If you have a suspicion in your own breast, keep that suspicion in your own breast."

Mr. Jaggers was to be my guardian. He left twenty guineas and appointed the day week for my departure to London, where I would study with a tutor named Mr. Matthew Pocket—Miss Havisham's relation, the Matthew whose place was to be at her head when she lay dead.

When Jaggers offered Joe compensation for the loss of my services, Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. "Pip is that hearty welcome to go free with his services, to honour and fortun', as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child—what come to the forge—and ever the best of friends!—"

O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to! I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel's wing!

When Jaggers pressed the point, Joe suddenly worked round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic purpose: "Which I meantersay, that if you come into my place bull-baiting and badgering me, come out!" Jaggers backed near the door and delivered his valedictory remarks from there.

That night, Joe told Biddy: "Pip's a gentleman of fortun' then, and God bless him in it!" They congratulated me, but there was a certain touch of sadness in their congratulations that I rather resented. I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand, looking into the fire, feeling offended whenever I caught them looking at me—though Heaven knows they never expressed mistrust by word or sign.

That first night of my bright fortunes was the loneliest I had ever known. Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe's pipe floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe—not obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared together.

Chapter XIX.

Morning brightened my prospect considerably. After breakfast, Joe brought out my indentures and we put them in the fire, and I felt that I was free. I strolled out to finish off the marshes, feeling a sublime compassion for the poor creatures destined to go to church there all their lives. I formed a plan for bestowing a dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everybody in the village.

At the old Battery I fell asleep, and awoke to find Joe sitting beside me. "As being the last time, Pip, I thought I'd foller." I told him I should never forget him. "It's a pity now, Joe, that you did not get on a little more, when we had our lessons here; isn't it?" Joe was perfectly innocent of my meaning—that when I came into my property, it would have been more agreeable if he had been better qualified for a rise in station.

I took Biddy into our little garden and asked her to help improve Joe's learning and manners. "Have you never considered that he may be too proud to let any one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well and with respect?" I accused her of being envious and grudging. "Yet a gentleman should not be unjust neither," said Biddy, turning away her head. I walked away feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this, the second night of my bright fortunes, should be as lonely and unsatisfactory as the first.

I ordered new clothes from Mr. Trabb the tailor, who forgot the butter in bed and exclaimed "Lord bless my soul!" when he heard of my fortune. Mr. Trabb's boy, the most audacious boy in all that countryside, was sweeping the shop and knocked the broom against all possible corners to express equality with any blacksmith, alive or dead—until his master crushed him with severity. My first decided experience of the stupendous power of money was that it had morally laid upon his back Trabb's boy.

Pumblechook was waiting with a collation and endless handshakes—"May I? May I?"—claiming to have always said, "That boy is no common boy, and mark me, his fortun' will be no common fortun'." He helped me to the liver wing and the best slice of tongue—none of those out-of-the-way No Thoroughfares of Pork now. He hinted at a business opportunity requiring More Capital and a sleeping partner, which would be worthy of a young gentleman of spirit combined with property.

I visited Miss Havisham in my new clothes. Sarah Pocket positively reeled back. Miss Havisham quite gloated on Sarah's jealous dismay. "This is a gay figure, Pip," she said, making her crutch stick play round me as if she, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were bestowing the finishing gift. "You have a promising career before you. Be good—deserve it—and abide by Mr. Jaggers's instructions. Good-bye, Pip!—you will always keep the name of Pip, you know." I went down on my knee and put her hand to my lips, and so I left my fairy godmother standing in the dimly lighted room beside the rotten bride-cake hidden in cobwebs.

On my last evening, we had a hot supper and some flip. We were all very low. I was to leave at five in the morning, and I had told Joe I wished to walk away all alone—afraid of the contrast there would be between me and Joe if we went to the coach together.

I kissed my sister, kissed Biddy, and threw my arms around Joe's neck. Looking back, I saw Joe throwing an old shoe after me and Biddy throwing another. I stopped to wave my hat, and dear old Joe waved his strong right arm, crying huskily "Hooroar!" and Biddy put her apron to her face.

The village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, "Good-bye, O my dear, dear friend!"

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then.

We changed horses, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

The Second Stage of Pip's Expectations

Chapter XX.

I arrived in London, scared by its immensity and thinking it rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty. A hackney-coachman packed me up and delivered me to a gloomy street where MR. JAGGERS was painted on an open door. The coachman darkly closed an eye at the name and shook his head: "I know him!"

Mr. Jaggers's room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most dismal place, with an old rusty pistol, two dreadful casts of swollen faces on a shelf, and a high-backed chair of deadly black horsehair like a coffin. The wall opposite was greasy with the shoulders of clients who had backed up against it.

While waiting, I wandered to Smithfield, all asmear with filth and blood, and to Newgate Prison, where a partially drunk minister of justice offered to show me the gallows. People were waiting everywhere for Jaggers—two secret men, two women with shawls, and one excitable man performing a jig of anxiety under a lamp-post: "O Jaggerth, Jaggerth! All otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth!"

When Jaggers appeared, he dealt with his supplicants with supreme indifference, throwing his finger at them. "Now, I have nothing to say to you. I want to know no more than I know. Has Wemmick got it?" To the weeping woman: "If you come here bothering about your Bill, I'll make an example of both your Bill and you." In his office, he bullied a client named Mike whose witness—a murderous-looking confectioner, not by any means sober, with a painted-over black eye—was dismissed in extreme disgust.

My guardian informed me I was to go to Barnard's Inn, to young Mr. Pocket's rooms, and told me my very liberal allowance. "You will find your credit good, Mr. Pip, but I shall be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning the constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but that's no fault of mine."

Wemmick, the clerk—a dry man with a square wooden face that seemed chipped out with a dull-edged chisel, laden with mourning rings and a brooch of a lady at a weeping willow—walked me to my lodgings.

Chapter XXI.

Barnard's Inn was the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for Tom-cats—a melancholy little square with the most dismal trees, sparrows, cats, and houses I had ever seen. To Let, To Let, To Let glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants. Dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell and moaned, "Try Barnard's Mixture." So imperfect was this realisation of the first of my great expectations that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. "Ah!" said he, mistaking me, "the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me."

On the top floor, MR. POCKET, JUN. was painted on the door, with a label on the letter-box: "Return shortly." Mr. Pocket Junior's idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper-bag under each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of breath—he had been to Covent Garden Market on my account, thinking that coming from the country I might like a little fruit after dinner.

He wrestled with the door while making jam of his fruit, and it yielded so suddenly that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start out of my head, and as if this must be a dream.

As I stood opposite him, the starting appearance came into his own eyes that I knew to be in mine.

"Lord bless me, you're the prowling boy!"

"And you," said I, "are the pale young gentleman!"

Chapter XXII.

Herbert Pocket—for that was the pale young gentleman's name—had a frank and easy way that was very taking, a natural incapacity to do anything secret and mean, and something wonderfully hopeful about his general air that at the same time whispered he would never be very successful or rich. He was still a pale young gentleman, with a certain conquered languor about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness. His figure was a little ungainly, but it looked as if it would always be light and young.

He told me Miss Havisham had sent for him too, on a trial visit, and if successful he might have been "what-you-may-called it to Estella—affianced, betrothed, engaged." But she couldn't take a fancy to him. "She's a Tartar," he said of Estella. "Hard and haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex."

Over dinner—gently correcting my table manners along the way ("in London it is not the custom to put the knife in the mouth, for fear of accidents," and "a dinner-napkin will not go into a tumbler")—Herbert told me Miss Havisham's story. She was a spoilt heiress, her father a rich brewer. She had a half-brother by a secret second marriage, who turned out riotous and extravagant. A showy man made love to her, practised on her affection systematically, got great sums of money from her, and induced her to buy her brother out of the brewery at an immense price. My father—Herbert's father, Matthew Pocket—the only independent relation, warned her she was placing herself too unreservedly in this man's power. She angrily ordered him out of the house.

The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses bought, the guests invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter, which she received when she was dressing for her marriage, at twenty minutes to nine—"at the hour and minute at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks." When she recovered from a bad illness, she laid the whole place waste and has never since looked upon the light of day. It was suspected the man had acted in concert with her half-brother, sharing the profits.

Herbert christened me "Handel," after the Harmonious Blacksmith. He was in a counting-house, looking about him for his opening, planning to trade to the East Indies for silks and spices, to the West Indies for sugar and rum, and to Ceylon for elephants' tusks. His manner of bearing his poverty exactly corresponded to his manner of bearing that defeat in the garden—he took all blows and buffets with the same air. "I haven't begun insuring yet," he confessed. "I am looking about me." It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn't be out of a counting-house and look about you; but I silently deferred to his experience. "Then the time comes when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made your capital, you have nothing to do but employ it." This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden; very like. Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being puffed up.

On that first Sunday in London, in the dead of night, the footsteps of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard's Inn fell hollow on my heart. On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I had left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and them partook of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance off.

Chapter XXIII.

Mr. Pocket's household at Hammersmith was a scene of cheerful chaos. Mrs. Pocket, the only daughter of a deceased Knight who had raised her to expect a title, was highly ornamental but perfectly helpless and useless. She sat reading a book about titles while her children tumbled up around her, tripping over her footstool. The nurses Flopson and Millers managed everything while Mrs. Pocket picked up and dropped her handkerchief seven times.

"Mamma," said Herbert, "this is young Mr. Pip." Mrs. Pocket received me with an appearance of amiable dignity and asked, "I hope your mamma is quite well?"—which put me into such difficulty that the nurse had to rescue me.

Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a perplexed expression and very grey hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to putting anything straight. He had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge, but having married Mrs. Pocket very early, had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder—a tutor. When domestic crises arose—the cook mislaying the beef, the baby imperilled by nut-crackers—he would put his two hands into his disturbed hair and appear to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he was about.

Two other students boarded there: Drummle, an old-looking young man of heavy architecture and sulky disposition, next heir but one to a baronetcy; and Startop, younger and more agreeable.

The baby was the soul of honour, and little Jane—a mere mite who seemed to have taken charge of the others—was the only family member with whom it had any decided acquaintance. "Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions!" cried Mr. Pocket in desolate desperation, lifting himself some inches out of his chair by his hair. Mrs. Coiler, a toady neighbour of that highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody according to circumstances, flattered me so grossly that the pleasure was soon over.

Chapter XXIV.

Mr. Pocket proved always zealous and honourable as my tutor, and I was zealous and honourable in return. I arranged to keep my bedroom at Barnard's Inn while studying at Hammersmith, sharing rooms with Herbert. Mr. Jaggers approved, extracting the sum of twenty pounds from me with his characteristic bullying manner—"Come! How much? Fifty pounds? Five pounds?" "More than that." "More than that, eh! How much more?" "It is so difficult to fix a sum." "Come! Twice five; will that do? Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?"

Wemmick showed me the office—the celebrated death-masks on the shelf, which he blew the dust off and brought down. "These are two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit." One had murdered his master; the other had forged wills. All Wemmick's mourning rings and jewelry were gifts from condemned clients. "I always take 'em. They're curiosities. And they're property. They may not be worth much, but, after all, they're property and portable. It don't signify to you with your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is, 'Get hold of portable property.'"

He invited me to visit him at Walworth, and advised me to look at Jaggers's housekeeper when I dined there: "You'll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very uncommon, you'll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness of the beast, and the amount of taming. It won't lower your opinion of Mr. Jaggers's powers. Keep your eye on it."

At the police-court, I watched Jaggers in action—striking everyone with awe. If anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said, "I'll have it out of you!" and if anybody made an admission, he said, "Now I have got you!" The magistrates shivered under a single bite of his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words. Which side he was on I couldn't make out, for he seemed to be grinding the whole place in a mill; I only know that when I stole out on tiptoe, he was not on the side of the bench; for he was making the legs of the old gentleman who presided quite convulsive under the table, by his denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and justice in that chair that day.

Chapter XXV.

Drummle was sulky, idle, proud, niggardly, reserved, and suspicious—a blockhead nursed by rich people in Somersetshire. Startop was devotedly attached to his mother and had a woman's delicacy of feature. Herbert was my intimate companion and friend, and we used to walk between Hammersmith and Barnard's Inn at all hours. Miss Havisham's toady relations—Camilla, Sarah Pocket, Georgiana—turned up at Mr. Pocket's, hating me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment, fawning upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. I soon contracted expensive habits, but stuck to my books.

I visited Wemmick at Walworth and found his house a little wooden cottage cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns. He had a drawbridge over a chasm four feet wide, a flagstaff with a real flag on Sundays, a fountain, and a cannon that fired every night at nine, Greenwich time. "I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own Jack of all Trades. It brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged."

His Aged Parent—a very old man, intensely deaf—was clean, cheerful, and well cared for. "Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that's what he likes. Nod away at him, if you please, like winking!" The old man cried, "This is a fine place of my son's, sir! This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son's time, for the people's enjoyment."

At nine o'clock the Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy little cottage, and the Aged cried exultingly, "He's fired! I heerd him!" By degrees, Wemmick got dryer and harder as we walked to the office next morning, and his mouth tightened into a post-office again. "Never seen it," he said of Jaggers and the Castle. "Never heard of it. The office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me."

Chapter XXVI.

Dining at Jaggers's house in Gerrard Street—a stately house, dolefully in want of painting—I found no silver in the service, of course, and at the side of his chair a capacious dumb-waiter with bottles and decanters. He kept everything under his own hand and distributed everything himself. No other attendant than the housekeeper appeared: a woman of about forty, extremely pale, with large faded eyes and a quantity of streaming hair, whose face looked as if it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces rising out of the Witches' caldron in Macbeth. She set on every dish, keeping her eyes attentively on my guardian, removing her hands hesitatingly as if she dreaded his calling her back, and wanted him to speak when she was nigh.

Jaggers seemed principally interested in Drummle, whom he called "the Spider"—"the blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow." By some invisible agency, my guardian wound Drummle up to a pitch little short of ferocity, and when our conversation turned to rowing and Drummle bared his arm to show his muscles, we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous manner. Suddenly Jaggers clapped his hand on the housekeeper's like a trap. "If you talk of strength, I'll show you a wrist. Molly, let them see your wrist." "Master," she murmured, her eyes entreatingly fixed upon him, "don't." "Molly, let them see both your wrists. Show them. Come!" Her wrists were deeply scarred across and across. "Very few men have the power of wrist that this woman has. It's remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these hands." She looked at every one of us in regular succession as he spoke, and the moment he ceased, she looked at him again. "That'll do, Molly. You have been admired, and can go."

Drummle grew intolerable, and nearly flung a glass at Startop's head, but Jaggers dexterously seized it. "I am exceedingly sorry to announce that it's half past nine." Startop was cheerily calling Drummle "old boy" as they left, but Drummle would not even walk on the same side of the way. Afterwards, washing his hands of us, Jaggers told me: "I like that Spider though. He is one of the true sort."

Chapter XXVII.

Biddy wrote that Joe was coming to London. I looked forward to his visit not with pleasure but with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.

Joe arrived at Barnard's Inn, catching both my hands and working them straight up and down like a pump, his hat held carefully like a bird's-nest with eggs in it. Throughout the visit he was stiff and uncomfortable, calling me "sir," his hat tumbling off the mantelpiece at intervals. He told me Wopsle had left the Church and gone into playacting—"which the playacting have likeways brought him to London." He gave me a crumpled play-bill announcing "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown."

Herbert entered, and Joe backed from his outstretched hand, holding on by the bird's-nest. "Your servant, Sir. Which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot? For the present may be a werry good inn, according to London opinions, but I wouldn't keep a pig in it myself."

I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him—having neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me.

Joe delivered his message: Miss Havisham wished to tell me that Estella had come home and would be glad to see me. Then he rose to go.

"Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there's been any fault at all to-day, it's mine. You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain't that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I'm wrong in these clothes. I'm wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th' meshes. You won't find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!"

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity in him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he spoke these words than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover myself, I hurried out after him, but he was gone.

Chapter XXVIII.

In the first flow of my repentance it was clear that I must stay at Joe's. But I soon invented reasons for putting up at the Blue Boar—I should be an inconvenience at Joe's, I was not expected, my bed would not be ready. All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.

On the afternoon coach, I found two convicts being transported, handcuffed together with irons on their legs. One was the stranger from the Jolly Bargemen who had stirred his rum with the file—I knew his half-closed eye at one glance. He did not recognise me. But as I dozed, I overheard them talking behind me of "Two One Pound notes" and how my convict, tried again for prison breaking, had been "made a Lifer." I alighted as soon as we touched the town, to get away from them. At the Blue Boar, the local newspaper contained a paragraph identifying Pumblechook as "the Mentor of our young Telemachus" and "the founder of the latter's fortunes." I entertain a conviction that if I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met somebody there who would have told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron.

Chapter XXIX.

I went to Miss Havisham's, painting brilliant pictures of her plans for me—she had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going, tear down the cobwebs, and marry the Princess. I loved Estella simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

Orlick was now porter at Miss Havisham's gate—a slovenly, confined room like a cage for a human dormouse. Inside, sitting near Miss Havisham with the white shoe in her hand, was an elegant lady whom I had never seen. Then I saw that the eyes were Estella's eyes. She was so much changed, so much more beautiful, so much more womanly, in all things winning admiration, that I seemed to have made none. O the sense of distance and disparity that came upon me, and the inaccessibility that came about her!

Miss Havisham drew my head close to hers and whispered with passionate eagerness: "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces—and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper—love her, love her, love her! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!"

She said the word often enough, but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love—despair—revenge—dire death—it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse.

Estella told me in the garden: "You must know that I have no heart—if that has anything to do with my memory. I have no softness there, no sympathy, sentiment, nonsense." In her looks and gestures there was a tinge of resemblance to Miss Havisham, and yet I could not trace it. What was it? The dim suggestion crossed me and was gone.

Jaggers arrived for dinner. He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else in hand—held it between himself and the candle, tasted the port, rolled it in his mouth, swallowed it, looked at his glass again, and cross-examined the glass again, until I was as nervous as if the wine were telling him something to my disadvantage.

We played whist, and Miss Havisham had put some of the most beautiful jewels from her dressing-table into Estella's hair and about her bosom and arms; and I saw even my guardian look at her from under his thick eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him, with those rich flushes of glitter and colour in it.

It was arranged that when Estella came to London I should be forewarned of her coming and should meet her at the coach. I took leave of her, and touched her and left her. Far into the night, Miss Havisham's words sounded in my ears, and I said to my pillow, "I love her, I love her, I love her!" hundreds of times. Then, a burst of gratitude came upon me, that she should be destined for me, once the blacksmith's boy. But I never thought there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe, because I knew she would be contemptuous of him. It was but a day gone, and Joe had brought the tears into my eyes; they had soon dried, God forgive me! soon dried.

Chapter XXX.

I told Jaggers that Orlick was not the right sort of man for Miss Havisham's. "Why of course he is not the right sort of man, Pip," said my guardian, comfortably satisfied, "because the man who fills the post of trust never is the right sort of man." He went round and paid Orlick off that very morning.

In town, that unlimited miscreant Trabb's boy tormented me three times in the High Street. First, his knees smote together, his hair uprose, and crying to the populace "Hold me! I'm so frightened!" he feigned a paroxysm of terror at my dignity. Then, coming round a narrow corner, he staggered round and round me with knees more afflicted and uplifted hands as if beseeching for mercy. Finally, wearing his blue bag in the manner of my great-coat, he strutted along the pavement attended by delighted young friends, drawling, "Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know yah!" The disgrace of his pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith, ejected me from the town. But unless I had taken the life of Trabb's boy on that occasion, I really do not even now see what I could have done save endure. To have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say that Mr. Pip must decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed to the best interests of society, as to employ a boy who excited Loathing in every respectable mind. I sent a penitential codfish and barrel of oysters to Joe as reparation for not having gone myself.

Back at Barnard's Inn, I confessed to Herbert: "I love—I adore—Estella." Instead of being transfixed, Herbert replied in an easy matter-of-course way, "Exactly. Well? Of course I know that. You have always told me all day long. You brought your adoration and your portmanteau here together."

Herbert gently warned me: "Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. This may lead to miserable things." "I know it, Herbert, but I can't help it." "You can't detach yourself?" "No. Impossible!" "You can't try, Handel?" "No. Impossible!"

"Well!" said Herbert, getting up with a lively shake, "now I'll endeavour to make myself agreeable again!" He confided his own secret engagement to Clara, whose invalid father lived upstairs and made tremendous rows—"roars, and pegs at the floor with some frightful instrument." "But you can't marry, you know, while you're looking about you."

Chapter XXXI.

On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The Danish nobility consisted of a noble boy in wash-leather boots, a venerable Peer with a dirty face, and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair. My gifted townsman stood gloomily apart with folded arms.

Whenever the undecided Prince had to ask a question, the public helped him out. When he asked whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some said "Toss up for it." When he appeared with his stocking disordered, a conversation arose in the gallery respecting the paleness of his leg. The sulky man growled, "Now the baby's put to bed let's have supper!" Mr. Wopsle's greatest trials were in the churchyard, where the gravedigger was advised, "Look out! Here's the undertaker a coming!" The arrival of the body for interment was the signal for general joy. We sat feeling keenly for him, but laughing from ear to ear.

Afterwards, Mr. Wopsle—now calling himself Mr. Waldengarver—received us in a hot packing-case behind the stage. His dresser told us, "Skin the stockings off Mr. Waldengarver, or you'll bust 'em. Bust 'em, and you'll bust five-and-thirty shillings." We invited him to supper at Barnard's Inn, and he sat until two o'clock reviewing his success. Miserably I went to bed, and miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I had to play Hamlet to Miss Havisham's Ghost before twenty thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it.

Chapter XXXII.

One day I received a note from Estella—the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter. "I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I believe it was settled you should meet me? She sends you her regard. Yours, ESTELLA." My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until the day arrived.

Waiting for the coach, Wemmick ran against me and invited me to Newgate. He walked among the prisoners much as a gardener might walk among his plants—"What, Captain Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!" and "Is that Black Bill behind the cistern? Why I didn't look for you these two months; how do you find yourself?" A condemned Coiner—a portly upright man with a peculiar pallor and eyes that went wandering about—shook Wemmick's hand and promised him a pair of pigeons. "Still you see, as far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are portable property all the same." With that, Wemmick looked back and nodded at this dead plant, and cast his eyes about as if considering what other pot would go best in its place.

I thought how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime—that in my childhood on the lonely marshes I had first encountered it, and that it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her. I beat the prison dust off my feet, and shook it out of my dress, and exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel that when the coach came quickly after all, I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

Chapter XXXIII.

Estella arrived in her furred travelling-dress, more delicately beautiful than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more winning than she had cared to let it be to me before. She was going to live at Richmond, at great expense, with a lady who had the power of taking her about and introducing her and showing people to her and showing her to people. "We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I."

As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an inner meaning in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with displeasure.

She told me the Pocket relations beset Miss Havisham with reports and insinuations against me. "You may be certain that I laugh because they fail. For you were not brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity."

"If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?" "You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you like." I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue's. "Now," said Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, "you are to take care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond."

I took her to Richmond. She gave me her hand and a smile and said good-night, and was absorbed into the staid old house by the green. And still I stood looking at it, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable. I got into the carriage with a bad heart-ache, and got out with a worse heart-ache.

Chapter XXXIV.

I had insensibly begun to notice the effect of my expectations upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own character I disguised from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to Joe. Many a time of an evening, when I sat alone looking at the fire, I thought there was no fire like the forge fire and the kitchen fire at home. Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of mind that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part in its production.

My lavish habits led Herbert's easy nature into expenses he could not afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace with anxieties and regrets. We joined a club called The Finches of the Grove, whose object seemed to be dining expensively once a fortnight and quarrelling after dinner. We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I ever saw him do anything else but look about him.

Periodically Herbert and I would say, "Let us look into our affairs." We ordered something special for dinner, produced pens and stationery, and wrote out our debts with great ceremony. I had the highest opinion of my system of "leaving a Margin"—putting debts down at round numbers above the actual amount—though we always ran into new debt immediately to the full extent of the margin. There was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush consequent on these examinations that gave me an admirable opinion of myself. I would sit with our symmetrical bundles of bills on the table and feel like a Bank of some sort, rather than a private individual.

Then a letter arrived with a heavy black seal: Mrs. J. Gargery had departed this life on Monday last at twenty minutes past six in the evening.

Chapter XXXV.

It was the first time that a grave had opened in my road of life, and the gap it made in the smooth ground was wonderful. The figure of my sister in her chair by the kitchen fire haunted me night and day. That the place could possibly be without her was something my mind seemed unable to compass.

I went down for the funeral. At last I came within sight of the house, and saw that Trabb and Co. had put in a funereal execution and taken possession. Two dismally absurd persons, each exhibiting a crutch done up in a black bandage, were posted at the front door. Poor dear Joe sat entangled in a little black cloak tied in a large bow under his chin, stationed apart as chief mourner. "Pip, old chap, you knowed her when she were a fine figure of a—" and clasped my hand and said no more.

"Pocket-handkerchiefs out, all!" cried Mr. Trabb in a depressed business-like voice. "We are ready!" So we all put our pocket-handkerchiefs to our faces, as if our noses were bleeding, and filed out two and two. And there, my sister was laid quietly in the earth, while the larks sang high above it, and the light wind strewed it with beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.

Pumblechook had the hardihood to hint that she would have considered her death reasonably purchased at the price of my doing her so much honour. Then he drank all the rest of the sherry.

In the garden, Biddy told me how my sister had died: she came out of one of her bad states, said quite plainly "Joe," then "Pardon," and once "Pip," and never lifted her head up any more. Biddy cried; the darkening garden, and the lane, and the stars that were coming out, were blurred in my own sight.

I promised grandly that I would come down often to see Joe. "Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?" asked Biddy, stopping in the narrow garden walk and looking at me under the stars with a clear and honest eye. I was offended by this, but as I walked away next morning, the mists rising seemed to disclose that I should not come back, and that Biddy was quite right.

Chapter XXXVI.

I came of age. At Jaggers's office, the two ghastly casts on the shelf seemed to be making a stupid apoplectic attempt to attend to the conversation. "What do you suppose you are living at the rate of?" asked Jaggers. I had looked into my affairs so often that I had thoroughly destroyed any slight notion I might ever have had of their bearings. "I thought so!" said Jaggers, and blew his nose with an air of satisfaction.

He gave me a bank-note for five hundred pounds—my annual income henceforth, to be drawn quarterly from Wemmick. "That handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this day, in earnest of your expectations. And at the rate of that handsome sum of money per annum, and at no higher rate, you are to live until the donor of the whole appears." My benefactor's identity remained secret. "When that person discloses, my part in this business will cease and determine. When that person discloses, it will not be necessary for me to know anything about it. And that's all I have got to say."

I consulted Wemmick at the office about helping Herbert to a start in business. Wemmick tightened his post-office and shook his head. "I should like just to run over with you on my fingers the names of the various bridges up as high as Chelsea Reach. Let's see; there's London, one; Southwark, two; Blackfriars, three; Waterloo, four; Westminster, five; Vauxhall, six. Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip, and pitch your money into the Thames over the centre arch of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and you may know the end of it too—but it's a less pleasant and profitable end."

"Then is it your opinion that a man should never invest portable property in a friend?" "Certainly he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend—and then it becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid of him."

But I pressed: "Would that be your opinion at Walworth?" "Mr. Pip, Walworth is one place, and this office is another. Much as the Aged is one person, and Mr. Jaggers is another. They must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments must be taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken in this office." "Very well," said I, much relieved, "then I shall look you up at Walworth, you may depend upon it."

Chapter XXXVII.

I devoted the next Sunday afternoon to a pilgrimage to the Castle, where I found the Union Jack flying and the drawbridge up. The Aged admitted me and told me his son was out on his afternoon walk but would soon return. Wemmick arrived with Miss Skiffins—a lady of wooden appearance, in the post-office branch of the service, whom I judged to stand possessed of portable property.

Over punch in the arbour, I told Wemmick of my wish to help Herbert to some present income—say a hundred a year—and gradually to buy him on to some small partnership, all without Herbert's knowledge. Wemmick was silent for a little while, and then said with a kind of start, "Well you know, Mr. Pip, I must tell you one thing. This is devilish good of you."

Through Miss Skiffins's brother, an accountant, we found a worthy young merchant named Clarriker who wanted intelligent help and capital, and who in due course would want a partner. I paid half my five hundred pounds down and engaged for further payments. The whole business was so cleverly managed that Herbert had not the least suspicion of my hand being in it. The radiant face with which he came home one afternoon and told me, as a mighty piece of news, of his having fallen in with Clarriker, and of Clarriker's having shown an extraordinary inclination towards him, and of his belief that the opening had come at last—I had the greatest difficulty in restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so happy. At length, the thing being done, and he having that day entered Clarriker's House, I did really cry in good earnest when I went to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good to somebody.

Meanwhile, at the Castle, I had observed Wemmick's slow and gradual stealing of his arm round Miss Skiffins's waist, and Miss Skiffins neatly stopping him with the green glove, unwinding his arm as if it were an article of dress, and laying it on the table before her with the greatest deliberation. This happened again and again while the Aged read the newspaper aloud through a keyhole voice.

Chapter XXXVIII.

I suffered every kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The nature of my relations with her, which placed me on terms of familiarity without placing me on terms of favour, conduced to my distraction. She made use of me to tease other admirers, and turned the very familiarity between us to the account of putting a constant slight on my devotion. I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

"Pip, Pip," she said one evening at a darkening window of the house in Richmond, "will you never take warning?" "Of what?" "Of me."

At Satis House, sharp words arose between Estella and Miss Havisham for the first time. Miss Havisham was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than before—there was something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces. She hung upon Estella's beauty, hung upon her words, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.

"You stock and stone! You cold, cold heart!" cried Miss Havisham. Estella looked at her with perfect composure. "I am what you have made me. Take all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the failure; in short, take me."

Miss Havisham demanded love. "Did I never give her love!" she cried, turning wildly to me. "Did I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy at all times, and from sharp pain, while she speaks thus to me!"

"Who taught me to be proud?" returned Estella. "Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?" "Who taught me to be hard?" "Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?"

"If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight—and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry. So I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me."

Miss Havisham settled down upon the floor among the faded bridal relics, her grey hair all adrift upon the ground—a miserable sight to see.

Meanwhile, Drummle began to follow Estella closely, and she allowed him to do it—now with encouragement, now with discouragement, now almost flattering him, now openly despising him. The Spider, as Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in wait, and had the patience of his tribe. At a ball, I begged her not to encourage such a contemptible fellow. "Do you want me then to deceive and entrap you?" she asked, turning suddenly with a fixed and serious look. "Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?" "Yes, and many others—all of them but you."

And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so filled my heart, I pass on to the event that had impended over me longer yet. In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of state was slowly wrought out of the quarry; all being made ready with much labour, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted, and the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.

Chapter XXXIX.

I was three-and-twenty, alone in our chambers in the Temple on a wild stormy night—wretched weather, stormy and wet, and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. The wind rushing up the river shook the house like discharges of cannon. At eleven o'clock I heard a footstep on the stair.

A man came slowly within the light of my lamp—substantially dressed but roughly, like a voyager by sea, with long iron-grey hair, about sixty, browned and hardened by weather. He held out both his hands to me with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me.

I did not know him. He sat before the fire and covered his forehead with his large brown veinous hands. "It's disapinting to a man," he said, "arter having looked for'ard so distant, and come so fur; but you're not to blame for that."

Then slowly I knew him—my convict from the marshes. If the wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I knew him now. He grasped my hands, raised them to his lips, and kissed them.

"You acted noble, my boy. Noble, Pip! And I have never forgot it!"

I tried to be civil, offered him a drink, suggested he must understand that our ways were different. He watched me steadily, then asked how I had done well since we were out on them lone shivering marshes. He guessed my income—"As to the first figure now. Five?"—and my guardian's name—"Would it be J?"

All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle for every breath I drew.

"Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea should go to you. I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman,—and, Pip, you're him!"

The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.

"Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son,—more to me nor any son. I've put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces wos like, I see yourn."

"I was sent for life. It's death to come back. There's been overmuch coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be hanged if took."

Miss Havisham's intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella not designed for me; I only suffered in Satis House as a convenience, a sting for the greedy relations, a model with a mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at hand. But sharpest and deepest pain of all—it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out of those rooms and hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe.

I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back to Biddy now, for any consideration; simply, I suppose, because my sense of my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every consideration. No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort that I should have derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but I could never, never, undo what I had done.

Nothing was needed but this; the wretched man, after loading wretched me with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked his life to come to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had loved him instead of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him by the strongest admiration and affection, instead of shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance; it could have been no worse. On the contrary, it would have been better, for his preservation would then have naturally and tenderly addressed my heart.

My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be seen from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While I did so, he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit; and when I saw him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at his meal again. It almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down presently, to file at his leg.

He slept with a pistol on his pillow. I softly removed the key to the outside of his door, and turned it on him before I sat down by the fire. Gradually I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor, and when I awoke the clocks were striking five, the candles were wasted out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain intensified the thick black darkness.

The Third Stage of Pip's Expectations

Chapter XL.

It was with a heavy heart that I announced my visitor as "my uncle" to the laundress and her niece—an inflammatory old female and an animated rag-bag, both chronically looking in at keyholes. In groping my way down the black staircase that morning, I fell over something—a man crouching in a corner, who eluded my touch in silence and could not be found when the watchman came with his lantern. It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on that night of all nights. The watchman mentioned that a person had come in with my uncle—"a working person, in a dust-coloured kind of clothes."

His real name was Magwitch, christened Abel. "What were you brought up to be?" "A warmint, dear boy." He answered quite seriously, as if it denoted some profession. He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy—terribly like a hungry old dog. "And this," said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, "and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip'late, is, to stand by and look at you, dear boy!"

I found him lodgings in Essex Street and went to Jaggers to confirm the terrible truth. "I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch that he is the benefactor so long unknown to me." "That is the man," said Jaggers, "in New South Wales." "And only he?" "And only he." "I always supposed it was Miss Havisham." "Not a particle of evidence, Pip. Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule."

Whatever Provis put on became him less than what he had worn before. The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes. He dragged one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and from head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man. The influences of his solitary hut-life gave him a savage air that no dress could tame. In all his ways of sitting and standing, of eating and drinking, of lifting light glasses to his lips as if they were clumsy pannikins, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as plain could be.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had of the dreadful mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening with his knotted hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, I would sit and look at him, loading him with all the crimes in the Calendar. I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that he would be, were no small addition to my horrors. Every hour so increased my abhorrence of him that I might have yielded to the impulse to flee, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.

Chapter XLI.

When Herbert at last came back from Marseilles, I could have wept for joy. He was sworn to secrecy on Provis's little black Testament—"Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in any way sumever! Kiss it!" Herbert, looking at me with friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and Provis immediately shook hands with him: "Now you're on your oath, you know. And never believe me on mine, if Pip shan't make a gentleman on you!"

When Provis was gone to his lodging, Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never felt before so blessedly what it is to have a friend. We sat stunned, sharing our repugnance without shaping a syllable. Herbert unconsciously took Provis's chair, then started out of it, pushed it away, and took another.

"What is to be done?" The first thing was to get him out of England. I could take no more of his money, but I could not cut the ground from under his feet—in the moment of realisation, if I destroyed his idea and made his gains worthless, he might recklessly give himself up. "That is his power over you as long as he remains in England, and that would be his reckless course if you forsook him." I was so struck by the horror of this idea—the working out of which would make me regard myself, in some sort, as his murderer—that I could not rest in my chair, but began pacing to and fro. We must get him abroad, and I must go with him. "That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven's name, and we'll see it out together, dear old boy."

It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down again, with only that done.

Chapter XLII.

Provis told us his history: "Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a-going fur to tell you my life like a song, or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I'll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you've got it. That's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend."

He had first become aware of himself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for his living. "I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush." He was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that he regularly grew up took up. "This is a terrible hardened one," they said to prison visitors, picking him out. "May be said to live in jails, this boy."

At Epsom races he fell in with Compeyson—a swindler and forger, a gentleman who could speak with his face dropping into his white pocket-handkerchief. "He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he'd been to a public boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talk, and was a dab at the ways of gentlefolks." Compeyson's partner Arthur had died raving of a woman in white with a shroud over her arm—"She's all in white, wi' white flowers in her hair, and she's awful mad, and she's got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says she'll put it on me at five in the morning."

"He'd no more heart than a iron file, he was as cold as death, and he had the head of the Devil." Magwitch became Compeyson's tool and black slave. At their trial, Compeyson got seven years and Magwitch fourteen. "When we was put in the dock, I noticed what a gentleman Compeyson looked, wi' his curly hair and his black clothes and his white pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of a wretch I looked." The counsellor for Compeyson argued: "Here you has afore you, side by side, two persons as your eyes can separate wide; one, the younger, well brought up; one, the elder, ill brought up. Can you doubt, if there is but one in it, which is the one, and, if there is two in it, which is much the worst one?"

"I had said to Compeyson that I'd smash that face of his, and I swore Lord smash mine! to do it." On the prison-ship he hit Compeyson on the cheek, was put in the black-hole, escaped to the marshes—"and I was a hiding among the graves there, envying them as was in 'em and all over, when I first see my boy!"

Herbert pushed a note to me: "Young Havisham's name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who professed to be Miss Havisham's lover."

Chapter XLIII.

A new fear had been engendered in my mind: if Compeyson were alive and should discover Provis's return, he would not hesitate to become an informer. I resolved to see both Estella and Miss Havisham before going abroad.

At the Blue Boar I found Drummle, and we stood shoulder to shoulder before the fire, neither willing to yield an inch. We looked at each other's boots, and then at our own, and then at each other's again. "Have you been here long?" "Long enough to be tired of it." "Do you stay here long?" "Can't say. Do you?" "Can't say." I felt that if his shoulder had claimed another hair's breadth of room, I should have jerked him into the window.

"The lady won't ride to-day; the weather won't do," he told the waiter. "And I don't dine, because I'm going to dine at the lady's." Then he glanced at me with an insolent triumph on his great-jowled face that cut me to the heart. As he mounted his horse and rode away, a man in a dust-coloured dress appeared with a light for his cigar, and the slouching shoulders and ragged hair of this man reminded me of Orlick.

Chapter XLIV.

I told Miss Havisham I had found out who my patron was. "When I fell into the mistake, at least you led me on?" "Yes," she returned, nodding steadily, "I let you go on." "Was that kind?" "Who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?"

I asked her to help Herbert through Clarriker's, as I could no longer do it myself. She gradually withdrew her eyes from me and turned them on the fire, watching it for what seemed a long time. "What else?"

Then I turned to Estella. "You know I love you. You know that I have loved you long and dearly."

She raised her eyes to my face, her fingers plying their work, and looked at me with an unmoved countenance. "When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all."

"You would never marry him, Estella?"

Her fingers stopped for the first time. "Why not tell you the truth? I am going to be married to him."

I dropped my face into my hands. "Estella, dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead you into this fatal step. Put me aside for ever—you have done so, I well know—but bestow yourself on some worthier person than Drummle."

"It is my own act," she said in a gentler voice. "I am tired of the life I have led, which has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough to change it."

I poured out my heart: "You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!"

I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards I remembered that while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse.

I walked all the way to London. At the Temple gate, the night-porter handed me a note in Wemmick's writing: "DON'T GO HOME."

Chapter XLV.

I slept at the Hummums in Covent Garden—a sort of vault with a despotic monster of a four-post bedstead straddling over the whole place. What a doleful night! DON'T GO HOME plaited itself into whatever I thought of, as a bodily pain would have done. When I dozed, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home.

At Walworth next morning, I toasted the Aged's sausage while Wemmick told me what he had heard—in a certain place where he once took me—that a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits had made some little stir by disappearing, and that my chambers in Garden Court had been watched. Compeyson was alive and in London.

Herbert had already moved Provis to a house by the river-side, down the Pool between Limehouse and Greenwich, kept by a respectable widow with a furnished upper floor to let—the house where Clara and her bedridden father lived. "Without going near it yourself, you could always hear of the safety of Tom, Jack, or Richard through Mr. Herbert. And after a while, if you should want to slip Tom, Jack, or Richard on board a foreign packet-boat, there he is—ready."

Wemmick's final advice: "Avail yourself of this evening to lay hold of his portable property. You don't know what may happen to him. Don't let anything happen to the portable property." I spent the day dozing before Wemmick's fire with the Aged, and we had loin of pork for dinner, and greens grown on the estate. I nodded at the Aged with a good intention whenever I failed to do it drowsily. When it was quite dark, I left the Aged preparing the fire for toast; and I inferred from the number of teacups, as well as from his glances at the two little doors in the wall, that Miss Skiffins was expected.

Chapter XLVI.

I went that evening to Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks's Basin, and found the place to be a quiet spot enough. The house was over a ship-breaker's yard, and the river could be heard lapping at the wharf. Old Bill Barley—Clara's bedridden father—was a growling, snarling old man who stamped and roared overhead and was heard to demand in a stentorian voice, "Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder!" Clara herself was a lovely girl with a frank face and beautiful dark hair and eyes—I saw at once that she was devoted to Herbert, and he to her.

Provis was installed in the upper rooms, and seemed content. I told him that Herbert and I had resolved to row on the river regularly, so that when the time came to take him down to a steamer, the boat would attract no attention. He was to sit at his window with a light when all was well, and to draw the blind when there was cause for alarm. He was not to go out, and was not to communicate with anyone.

"I don't complain of none, dear boy," he said. "I've seen my boy, and he can be a gentleman without me."

I held his hand when I left him, and my repugnance to him was softening—I could not have said how much. His manner towards me had changed too; there was a softened, indefinably attentive quality in it that I had not noticed before. As I rowed home, I thought of him sitting alone in those rooms, looking out at the river, and I felt a tenderness for him that surprised me.

Chapter XLVII.

Some weeks passed without bringing any change. My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed for money by more than one creditor. I had determined it would be a heartless fraud to take more money from my patron, and had sent him the unopened pocket-book by Herbert. An impression settled heavily upon me that Estella was married. I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert never to speak of her to me.

One evening at the theatre, where Mr. Wopsle was performing as a sententious Enchanter in a Christmas pantomime, I noticed him staring at me with increasing glare and amazement from the stage. Afterwards, he was waiting for me near the door.

"Saw you, Mr. Pip! Yes, of course I saw you. But who else was there?"

"Who else?"

"It is the strangest thing. And yet I could swear to him." He told me that sitting behind me in the audience, like a ghost, he had seen one of the two convicts from the marshes—the one who had been mauled, the one who had been so terribly frightened. It was Compeyson.

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson's having been behind me "like a ghost." For if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments, it was in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow.

Chapter XLVIII.

Dining at Jaggers's with Wemmick, I learned that Estella was married—"Our friend the Spider has played his cards. He has won the pool." Jaggers speculated coldly: "If he should turn to, and beat her, he may possibly get the strength on his side; if it should be a question of intellect, he certainly will not. A fellow like our friend the Spider either beats or cringes."

Then the housekeeper Molly came in with a dish, and a certain action of her fingers—like the action of knitting—arrested my attention. I looked at those hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair; and I compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair that I knew of. I thought how the same inexplicable feeling had come over me when I last walked in the ruined garden, and how it had flashed about me like lightning when I had passed in a carriage through a sudden glare of light. And I felt absolutely certain that this woman was Estella's mother.

Walking home, Wemmick told me Molly's story. She had been tried at the Old Bailey for murder—a case of jealousy. The murdered woman was found dead in a barn, choked. Mr. Jaggers had worked the case to general admiration, arguing that the scratches on Molly's hands were from brambles, not fingernails. "It was a desperate case, and it was comparatively early days with him then, and he worked it to general admiration; in fact, it may almost be said to have made him." She was acquitted and went into his service immediately, tamed as she is now. It was suspected she had destroyed her child—a girl, about three years old—to revenge herself upon the father.

Chapter XLIX.

I returned to Satis House. Miss Havisham was seated in the room with the long table, alone by the fire. The moment I came in she looked at me with a look of pity and remorse that struck me to the heart. "What have I done! What have I done!" she wrung her hands and crushed her white hair.

She agreed to help Herbert through a secret payment of nine hundred pounds, and wrote out the order on the spot. I asked about Estella's parentage—she had received her as a baby of two or three years old from Jaggers, knowing nothing of the mother. "I meant to save her from misery like my own," she said.

Then she fell on her knees before me, wringing her hands: "If you can ever write under my name, 'I forgive her,' though ever so long after my broken heart is dust, pray do it!"

"O Miss Havisham, I can do it now. There have been sore mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you."

"What have I done! What have I done!" She dropped to the ground and clutched at my dress. I entreated her to rise, and got her into her chair, and calmed her.

As I walked through the old brewery, I turned to look back, and saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment I saw Miss Havisham running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her and soaring above her head. I got my great-coat off, closed with her, threw her down, and got it over her; then dragged the great cloth from the table, and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and all the ugly things that sheltered there. We were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies, and the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself.

She was badly burned, and lay on the great table where she had said she would one day be laid dead, murmuring over and over, "What have I done!" and "Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her!'"

Chapter L.

Herbert tended my burned hands—they were badly scorched, and for days I could do nothing for myself. While nursing me, Herbert told me what Provis had confided during my absence. Provis had once had a wife—a young woman of great strength and fierce jealousy, whom he had married "over the broomstick." She had been tried for the murder of another woman—a woman much larger and stronger—in a case of jealousy. At about the same time, it was believed she had destroyed their child, a girl of about three years old, to revenge herself upon Provis. Jaggers had defended her and got her acquitted.

I put it all together, and the discovery was like a secret bursting through the wall of a dark room to let in a flood of daylight. The child was Estella. Provis's wife was Molly, Jaggers's housekeeper. Estella—the proud, the refined, the beautiful—was the daughter of a convict and a woman tried for murder, raised by a half-mad recluse to wreak revenge upon the male sex. The whole design of her bringing-up, which had seemed so grand and mysterious, was the design of a broken heart working itself out upon the next generation. And the wretched man who sat in his lodging by the river, looking at the tide and thinking of me, did not know that his lost child lived—that she was the lady I loved. I resolved that he should never know. It could do him no good, and in his precarious situation it might do incalculable harm.

Chapter LI.

I went to Jaggers and told him I knew Estella was Provis's daughter and Molly's child. For the first and only time in our acquaintance, I saw my guardian shaken from his professional manner. He rose from his chair, walked to the window, and stood there with his back to me. Then he turned and said, in a manner quite unlike his usual bullying style, "Put the case, Pip."

He confirmed it all—but only hypothetically, as "put the case." Put the case that a woman under such circumstances had been received into the service of a lawyer, tamed, and kept. Put the case that the lawyer knew of a child—the child of that woman and of a man in hiding. Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. "Put the case that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power: 'I know what you did, and how you did it. Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to secure you from ever being brought to justice.' Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was cleared."

Wemmick, who had been listening from his desk, actually wiped his eyes. "I don't see him do it," said Wemmick to me, jerking his head towards Jaggers, "so I am sure he don't do it." But I had seen him, and I knew better.

Chapter LII.

A letter from Wemmick, dated Walworth: "Burn this as soon as read. Early in the week, or say Wednesday, you might do what you know of, if you felt disposed to try it. Now burn." We planned to row Provis down the river on Wednesday and put him aboard the Hamburg steamer.

Before that day came, I went to see Miss Havisham's condition. She was still very ill, attended by a doctor, lying on the great table in the room where she had so long sat—the room just as I had seen it last, except that the heap of rottenness in the midst was gone. She spoke of what she had done with the same remorseful earnestness, and I left her with a heavy heart.

On my return to the Temple, I found an anonymous note at the gate-house, written in a hand unknown to me: "If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or to-morrow night at nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln, you had better come. If you want information regarding your uncle Provis, you had much better come and tell no one and lose no time. You must come alone." The allusion to Provis cut me to the quick. Against my better judgment, and telling no one but leaving a note for Herbert in case I should not return, I went.

Chapter LIII.

It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed lands and passed out upon the marshes. The direction I took was towards the limekiln, miles from the old Battery. The lime was burning with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made up and left, and no workmen were visible.

I saw a light in the old sluice-house and knocked at the door. No answer. I tried the latch, and found a lighted candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress. As I took up the candle, it was extinguished by some violent shock, and the next thing I comprehended was that I had been caught in a strong running noose, thrown over my head from behind.

"Now," said a suppressed voice, "I've got you!"

I was fastened tight to a ladder against the wall. A flare of light showed me Orlick, sitting with his arms folded on the table, a gun with a brass-bound stock at his side.

"I'm a-going to have your life!" he said, bringing his fist down upon the table and rising as the blow fell. "You was always in Old Orlick's way since ever you was a child. You goes out of his way this present night."

My mind, with inconceivable rapidity, followed out all the consequences of such a death. Estella's father would believe I had deserted him; even Herbert would doubt me; Joe and Biddy would never know how sorry I had been that night. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.

"Wolf, I'll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as did for your shrew sister. I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you to-night. I giv' it her! I left her for dead." He drank from a tin bottle slung round his neck, and I knew that every drop it held was a drop of my life.

He told me he had been on the stairs at the Temple that night—"Old Orlick as you tumbled over on your stairs." He had taken up with new companions—Compeyson's people—who wrote fifty hands and had given him information about Provis. "'Ware Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!"

He threw the bottle from him and stooped, and I saw in his hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy handle. Without uttering one vain word of appeal, I shouted out with all my might and struggled with all my might. In the same instant I heard responsive shouts, saw figures and a gleam of light dash in at the door, and saw Orlick clear the table at a leap and fly out into the night.

Herbert and Startop had found my dropped letter and followed me down by post-chaise. Trabb's boy—true to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where he had no business—had guided them to the sluice-house. They had arrived just in time. We determined to go back to London that night, three in the post-chaise, to be clear away before the adventure was talked of. Wednesday was so close upon us—the day appointed for Provis's escape.

Chapter LIV.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold. Of all my worldly possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that filled a bag. We loitered down to the Temple stairs and cast off—Herbert in the bow, I steering. Our plan was to row down with the tide, lie by at a lonely tavern overnight, and hail the Hamburg or Rotterdam steamer next morning.

The crisp air, the sunlight, the movement on the river freshened me with new hope. Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate Market, and the White Tower and Traitor's Gate. At Mill Pond Bank we touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and Provis was on board, looking as like a river-pilot as my heart could have wished. "Dear boy!" he said, putting his arm on my shoulder. "Faithful dear boy, well done. Thankye, thankye!"

He was the least anxious of any of us. "If you knowed, dear boy, what it is to sit here alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day betwixt four walls, you'd envy me." He dipped his hand in the water and said, smiling with that softened air upon him: "I was a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. And it's run through my fingers and gone, you see!"

By dusk we found a dirty public-house at a little causeway. The Jack of the place—slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark himself—asked if we had seen a four-oared galley going up with the tide. This made us all uneasy. In the night I saw two men looking into our boat from the causeway, then striking across the marsh.

Next morning we set forth. At half-past one we saw the steamer's smoke, and behind it the smoke of another steamer. We got the bags ready and said good-bye to Herbert and Startop—neither Herbert's eyes nor mine were quite dry. Then I saw a four-oared galley shoot out from under the bank and row into the same track.

"You have a returned Transport there," called the man who held the lines. "His name is Abel Magwitch, otherwise Provis. I apprehend that man, and call upon him to surrender."

They ran the galley aboard of us. In the same moment, I saw Provis start up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the galley. The face disclosed was the face of the other convict of long ago—Compeyson. I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer, and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under me.

Provis was taken on board the galley, swimming but not freely, and instantly manacled. He had received severe injury in the chest and a deep cut in the head. He told me in a whisper that they had gone down fiercely locked in each other's arms, and that there had been a struggle under water, and that he had disengaged himself and swum away. Compeyson was drowned.

For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away; and in the hunted, wounded, shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe.

"Dear boy," he said, "I'm quite content to take my chance. I've seen my boy, and he can be a gentleman without me."

"I will never stir from your side," said I, "when I am suffered to be near you. Please God, I will be as true to you as you have been to me!"

I felt his hand tremble as it held mine, and he turned his face away, and I heard that old sound in his throat—softened now, like all the rest of him.

Chapter LV.

Provis was committed to take his trial at the next Sessions. It was the assurance of the sunshine and the river that he could not be. But he was, and his possessions were forfeited to the Crown. All the money I had received from him, all the expectations I had built upon, were gone. I was penniless, and deeply in debt besides. It was a strange thing that the very first drops of the rain of ruin that had begun to fall upon me should have been the drops that softened me.

Herbert, now established at Clarriker's and doing well—the one good thing my expectations had accomplished—came to me with a generous offer: a position as clerk in the firm's branch at Cairo. "You are part of the firm, Handel, whether you know it or not. Clara and I have talked about it again and again, and the dear little thing begged me to tell you that she would make you so welcome there." I accepted gratefully, though I could not go until Provis's case was decided.

Wemmick married Miss Skiffins in a ceremony of pure Walworth sentiment. He invited me for a walk one Monday morning, and as we passed a church, said with affected surprise, "Halloa! Here's a church! Let's go in!" Inside, the Aged Parent was waiting as witness, beaming with delight. "Here's Miss Skiffins! Let's have a wedding!" The Aged was so pleased that he was heard to crow in the vestry. Afterwards, Wemmick said to me, "This is altogether a Walworth sentiment, please. The office knows nothing of it."

I also learned that Orlick had been taken up on a charge of breaking into Pumblechook's house and robbing him—and that he was now in the county jail.

Chapter LVI.

Provis lay in prison, growing weaker day by day from his injuries. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death—he and two-and-thirty others, brought in to hear the sentence together. The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together. I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the sentence was carried out.

I petitioned every authority I could reach, but held little hope. I sat beside him daily as he faded. He was calm and resigned, and increasingly gentle. "Dear boy," he said one day, "I thought you was late. But I knowed you couldn't be that."

"It is just the time," said I. "I waited for it at the gate."

"You always waits at the gate; don't you, dear boy?"

"Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time."

"Thank'ee, dear boy, thank'ee. God bless you! You've never deserted me, dear boy."

I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had once meant to desert him.

On the last day, as the prison light grew dim, I told him that the child he had lost long ago lived and was a lady and very beautiful. And that I loved her. He raised my hand to his lips, then gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away, and his head dropped quietly on his breast.

"O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner!" I murmured.

Chapter LVII.

I fell gravely ill with fever and delirium. I knew nothing for weeks. I confused impossible existences with my own identity; I was a brick in the house wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped. Through all my delirium, there was one consistent thread: that I was on my way to the prison to see Provis, and that I was late, and that the gates were closing.

When at last I came to myself in the night, and looked up, there was a figure sitting beside my bed. I looked at it, and saw it was Joe.

"Is it Joe?"

"Which it air, old chap," said Joe.

"O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me!"

Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side, and put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.

"Which dear old Pip, old chap," said Joe, "you and me was ever friends. And when you're well enough to go out for a ride—what larks!"

He had come to London to nurse me, paying my debts and tending me with infinite patience and gentleness. After the fever broke, I was as weak as a child, and Joe carried me downstairs and out to the garden, and I leaned on his shoulder as I had leaned on Miss Havisham's, and we sat in the sunshine.

As I recovered, Joe called me "old chap" again, and we were easy together as in the old days. He told me Miss Havisham had died, leaving most of her fortune to Estella, with a cool four thousand pounds to Matthew Pocket—"and why, do you suppose, Pip? Because of Pip's account of him, the said Matthew." She had also left twenty-five pounds to each of the other relations. Orlick had been taken and was in the county jail.

But as my strength returned, I noticed Joe beginning to call me "sir" again, and growing distant. The old inequality between us was reasserting itself. He was not comfortable with me as a gentleman; he was only comfortable with me as the small boy he had carried on his back across the marshes. One morning I found him gone, with a letter on the table:

"Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again dear Pip and will do better without Jo. P.S. Ever the best of friends."

He had also left a receipt for the debt he had paid—and it was the debt for which I had been arrested. I resolved to follow him at once, to go to Joe, to thank him, to beg his forgiveness, and to ask Biddy to marry me. For I had come to see that Biddy was the wisest and best of all, and that if she would have me, I should be content to live the plain honest life I had once despised.

Chapter LVIII.

Three days after Joe left, I followed him. I was still very weak, and the journey was a long one.

I went down to the forge. The forge was closed. I found the house decorated with flowers. Joe and Biddy stood arm in arm—it was their wedding day.

"Dear Biddy, you have the best husband in the whole world, and if you could have seen him by my bed you would have—But no, you couldn't love him better than you do."

"No, indeed I couldn't. And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she will make you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, dear, good, noble Joe!"

Joe and Biddy were both so overjoyed to see me, and both so touched by what I said, that I was able to tell them how humbled and repentant I was. "And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then I shall be able to believe that you can trust me again, and think better of me, in the time to come!"

"O dear old Pip, old chap," said Joe. "God knows as I forgive you, if I have anythink to forgive!"

"Amen! And God knows I do!" echoed Biddy.

I sold everything I had, paid my creditors, and went abroad to work for Herbert at Clarriker's in Cairo. Within a year I became a partner. I lived happily there for eleven years, and paid off all my debts. I must not leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great house, or that we made mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well.

Chapter LIX.

I returned to England and went straight to the old forge, where I found Joe and Biddy by the kitchen fire with a little boy—the very image of me when I was small, sitting in my old place on the little stool. They had named him Pip.

"We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap," said Joe, "and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and we think he do."

I thought so too, and I took him out for a walk next day, and we talked immensely, understanding one another to perfection. And I took him down to the churchyard, and set him on a certain tombstone there, and he showed me from that elevation which stone was sacred to the memory of Philip Pirrip, late of this Parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above.

"Biddy," said I, when I talked with her after supper, as her little girl lay sleeping in her lap, "you must give Pip to me one of these days; or lend him, at all events."

"No, no," said Biddy, gently. "You must marry."

"So Herbert and Clara say, but I don't think I shall, Biddy. I have so settled down in their home, that it's not at all likely."

Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her lips, and then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it into mine. There was something in the action, and in the light pressure of Biddy's wedding-ring, that had a very pretty eloquence in it.

Biddy told me Estella's husband Drummle had treated her with great cruelty, and was dead—killed by the kick of a horse he had ill-used.

That evening, for Estella's sake, I went to the site of the old Satis House. The house itself was gone, pulled down; but the old garden remained, a wilderness of weeds. There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the wall of the old garden. A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet up to scatter it. But the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the evening was not dark.

In the starlight, I saw a solitary figure walking in the desolate garden. It was Estella.

"I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me."

The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable majesty and its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in it I had seen before; what I had never seen before was the saddened, softened light of the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before was the friendly touch of the once insensible hand.

We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, "After so many years, it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our first meeting was! Do you often come back?"

"I have never been here since."

"Nor I."

The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white ceiling, which had passed away. I thought of the pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had heard on earth.

"I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been prevented by many circumstances. Poor, poor old place!"

The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and the same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. The ground belonged to her—the only possession she had not relinquished. She had come to take leave of it before its change.

"I have often thought of you," said Estella.

"Have you?"

"Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. But since my life has been broken, I have been able to think of it; and a little thought for it has made it much dearer. You have always held your place in my heart."

"You have always held your place in my heart," I answered.

"I little thought," said Estella, "that I should take leave of you in taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so."

"Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me, the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful."

"But you said to me," returned Estella, very earnestly, "'God bless you, God forgive you!' And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to say that to me now—now, when suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends."

"We are friends," said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.

"And will continue friends apart," said Estella.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.