No!"

imperiously stopping me as I opened my lips. "I have not bestowed

my tenderness anywhere. I have never had any such thing."

In another moment we were in the brewery so long disused, and she

pointed to the high gallery where I had seen her going out on that

same first day, and told me she remembered to have been up there,

and to have seen me standing scared below. As my eyes followed her

white hand, again the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly

grasp, crossed me. My involuntary start occasioned her to lay her

hand upon my arm. Instantly the ghost passed once more, and was

gone.

What was it?

"What is the matter?" asked Estella. "Are you scared again?"

"I should be, if I believed what you said just now," I replied, to

turn it off.

"Then you don't? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham

will soon be expecting you at your old post, though I think that

might be laid aside now, with other old belongings. Let us make one

more round of the garden, and then go in. Come! You shall not shed

tears for my cruelty to-day; you shall be my Page, and give me your

shoulder."

Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one

hand now, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we

walked. We walked round the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and

it was all in bloom for me. If the green and yellow growth of weed

in the chinks of the old wall had been the most precious flowers

that ever blew, it could not have been more cherished in my

remembrance.

There was no discrepancy of years between us, to remove her far

from me; we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age

told for more in her case than in mine; but the air of

inaccessibility which her beauty and her manner gave her, tormented

me in the midst of my delight, and at the height of the assurance I

felt that our patroness had chosen us for one another. Wretched

boy!

At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with

surprise, that my guardian had come down to see Miss Havisham on

business, and would come back to dinner. The old wintry branches of

chandeliers in the room where the mouldering table was spread, had

been lighted while we were out, and Miss Havisham was in her chair

and waiting for me.

It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we

began the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal

feast. But, in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave

fallen back in the chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked

more bright and beautiful than before, and I was under stronger

enchantment.

The time so melted away, that our early dinner-hour drew close at

hand, and Estella left us to prepare herself. We had stopped near

the centre of the long table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her

withered arms stretched out of the chair, rested that clenched hand

upon the yellow cloth. As Estella looked back over her shoulder

before going out at the door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to

her, with a ravenous intensity that was of its kind quite dreadful.

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me,

and said in a whisper:

"Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?"

"Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."

She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers

as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her! How does

she use you?"

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a

question at all), she repeated, "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!"

Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her

utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm

round my neck, swell with the vehemence that possessed her.