would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the
summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very
beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and
wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing
beggar my neighbor by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks,
and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if
I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances
and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do,
and stick to it, and make the best of it. 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!"

We talked a good deal as we walked, and 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; she would far rather have wounded her own
breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much
the better of the two?

"Biddy," said I, when we were walking homeward, "I wish you could put me
right."

"I wish I could!" said Biddy.

"If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,--you don't mind my
speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?"

"Oh dear, not at all!" said Biddy. "Don't mind me."

"If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me."

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

It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have
done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed
I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it
decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it
rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.

When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and
get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or
from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way),
Old Orlick.

"Halloa!" he growled, "where are you two going?"

"Where should we be going, but home?"

"Well, then," said he, "I'm jiggered if I don't see you home!"

This penalty of being jiggered was a favorite supposititious case of
his. He attached no defin