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.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I
had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert;
I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she,
quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping