Ah, Matthew, Matthew! You know

your way, sir?"

Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark, many a

time. I ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped

in my old way at the door of Miss Havisham's room. "Pip's rap," I

heard her say, immediately; "come in, Pip."

She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress, with her

two hands crossed on her stick, her chin resting on them, and her

eyes on the fire. Sitting near her, with the white shoe that had

never been worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at

it, was an elegant lady whom I had never seen.

"Come in, Pip," Miss Havisham continued to mutter, without looking

round or up; "come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand

as if I were a queen, eh? - Well?"

She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and repeated in

a grimly playful manner,

"Well?"

"I heard, Miss Havisham," said I, rather at a loss, "that you were

so kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly."

"Well?"

The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and

looked archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella's

eyes. But she was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so

much more womanly, in all things winning admiration had made such

wonderful advance, that I seemed to have made none. I fancied, as I

looked at her, that I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and

common boy again. O the sense of distance and disparity that came

upon me, and the inaccessibility that came about her!

She gave me her hand. I stammered something about the pleasure I

felt in seeing her again, and about my having looked forward to it

for a long, long time.

"Do you find her much changed, Pip?" asked Miss Havisham, with her

greedy look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between

them, as a sign to me to sit down there.

"When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was nothing of

Estella in the face or figure; but now it all settles down so

curiously into the old--"

"What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?" Miss

Havisham interrupted. "She was proud and insulting, and you wanted

to go away from her. Don't you remember?"

I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew no better

then, and the like. Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said

she had no doubt of my having been quite right, and of her having

been very disagreeable.

"Is he changed?" Miss Havisham asked her.

"Very much," said Estella, looking at me.

"Less coarse and common?" said Miss Havisham, playing with

Estella's hair.

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed

again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a

boy still, but she lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which

had so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come

home from France, and that she was going to London. Proud and

wilful as of old, she had brought those qualities into such

subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature -

or I thought so - to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was

impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched

hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood

- from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me

ashamed of home and Joe - from all those visions that had raised

her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the

anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the

wooden window of the forge and flit away. In a word, it was

impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present,

from the innermost life of my life.

It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day,

and return to the hotel at night, and to London to-morrow. When we

had conversed for a while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in

the neglected garden: on our coming in by-and-by, she said, I

should wheel her about a little as in times of yore.