All this she

did, without looking at me.

"My name is on the first leaf. 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," said I, "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."

She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted

it, and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on

her knees at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the

manner in which, when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole,

they must often have been raised to heaven from her mother's side.

To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my

feet, gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to

rise, and got my arms about her to help her up; but she only

pressed that hand of mine which was nearest to her grasp, and hung

her head over it and wept. I had never seen her shed a tear before,

and, in the hope that the relief might do her good, I bent over her

without speaking. She was not kneeling now, but was down upon the

ground.

"O!" she cried, despairingly. "What have I done! What have I done!"

"If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let

me answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any

circumstances. - Is she married?"

"Yes."

It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate

house had told me so.

"What have I done! What have I done!" She wrung her hands, and

crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over

again. "What have I done!"

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done

a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into

the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded

pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting

out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in

seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and

healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown

diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the

appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well. And could I

look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin

she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was

placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania,

like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of

unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in

this world?

"Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a

looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not

know what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!" And so

again, twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!

"Miss Havisham," I said, when her cry had died away, "you may

dismiss me from your mind and conscience. But Estella is a

different case, and if you can ever undo any scrap of what you have

done amiss in keeping a part of her right nature away from her, it

will be better to do that, than to bemoan the past through a

hundred years."

"Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip - my Dear!" There was an earnest

womanly compassion for me in her new affection. "My Dear! Believe

this: when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery

like my own. At first I meant no more."

"Well, well!" said I. "I hope so."

"But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually

did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my

teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a

warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and

put ice in its place."

"Better," I could not help saying, "to have left her a natural

heart, even to be bruised or broken."

With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and

then burst out again, What had she done!

"If you knew all my story," she pleaded, "you would have some

compassion for me and a better understanding of me."

"Miss Havisham," I answered, as delicately as I could, "I believe I

may say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I

first left this neighbourhood.