Let us out, you old fox, or I'll get him to
bring an action of false imprisonment against
you."

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day,
and stood laughing at us over the spikes of the
wicket when we descended the steps into the
street.

"Mind you, Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, gravely
in my ear, as he took my arm to be more
confidential; " I don't know that Mr. Jaggers does
a better thing than the way in which he keeps
himself so high. He's always so high. His
constant height is of a piece with his immense
abilities. That Colonel durst no more take leave
of him, than that turnkey durst ask him his
intentions respecting a case. Then, between his
height and them, he slips in his subordinate
don't you see?— and so he has 'em, soul and
body."

I was very much impressed, and not for the
first time, by my guardian's subtlety. To confess
the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
first time, that I had had some other guardian
of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in
Little Britain, where suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's
notice were lingering about as usual, and
I returned to my watch in the street of the
coach-office, with some three hours on hand. I
consumed the whole time in thinking how strange
it was that I should be encompassed by all this
taint of prison and crime; that in my childhood
out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening
I should have first encountered it; that it
should have reappeared on two occasions,
starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone;
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 wished that Wemmick
had not met me, or that I had not yielded
to him and gone with him, so that, of all days in
the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate
in my breath and on my clothes. I beat
the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and
fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I
feel, remembering who was coming, that the
coach came quickly after all, and 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.

What was the nameless shadow which again
in that one instant had passed?

CHAPTER XXXIII

IN her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed
more delicately beautiful than she had ever
seemed yet, even in my eves. Her manner was
more winning than she had cared to let it be
to me before, and I thought I saw Miss Havisham's
influence in the change.

We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed
out her luggage to me, and when it was all
collected I remembered—having forgotten everything
but herself in the mean while—that I knew
nothing of her destination.

"I am going to Richmond," she told me.
"Our lesson is, that there are two Richmonds,
one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that
mine is the Surrey Richmond. The distance is
ten miles. I am to have a carriage, and you
are to take me. This is my purse, and you are
to pay my charges out of it. Oh, you must take
the purse! 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.

"A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella.
Will you rest here a little?"

"Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to
drink some tea, and you are to take care of me
the while."

She drew her arm through mine, as if it must
be done, and I requested a waiter who had been
staring at the coach like a man who had never
seen such a thing in his life, to show us a private
sitting-room. Upon that, he pulled out a napkin,
as if it were a magic clue without which he
couldn't find the way up-stairs, and led us to the
black hole of the establishment: fitted up with a
diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous article
considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy
sauce-cruet, and somebody's pattens. On my
objecting to this retreat, he took us into another
room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the
grate a scorched leaf of a copy-book under a
Bushel of coal-dust. Having looked at this
extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he
took my order: which, proving to be merely
"Some tea for the lady," sent him out of the
room in a very low state of mind.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this
chamber, in its strong combination of stable
with soup-stock, might have led one to infer
that the coaching department was not doing
well, and that the enterprising proprietor was
boiling down the horses for the refreshment
department. Yet the room was all in all to me,
Estella being in it. I thought that with her I
could have been happy there for life. (I was
not at all happy there at the time, observe, and
I knew it wen.)

"Where are you going to, at Richmond?" I
asked Estella.

"I am going to live," said she, " at a great
expense, with a lady there, who has the power
—- or says she has—of taking me about and
introducing me, and showing people to me and
showing me to people."

"I suppose you will be glad of variety and
admiration?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

She answered so carelessly, that I said, " You
speak of yourself as if you were some one else."

"Where did you learn how I speak of others?
Come, come," said Estella, smiling delightfully,
"you must not expect me to go to school to you;