ll people? Does
any one live, who knows what set purposes you have, half as well as I
do? Does any one live, who knows what a steady memory you have, half
as well as I do? I who have sat on this same hearth on the little stool
that is even now beside you there, learning your lessons and looking up
into your face, when your face was strange and frightened me!"

"Soon forgotten!" moaned Miss Havisham. "Times soon forgotten!"

"No, not forgotten," retorted Estella,--"not forgotten, but treasured up
in my memory. When have you found me false to your teaching? When have
you found me unmindful of your lessons? When have you found me giving
admission here," she touched her bosom with her hand, "to anything that
you excluded? Be just to me."

"So proud, so proud!" moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her gray hair
with both her hands.

"Who taught me to be proud?" returned Estella. "Who praised me when I
learnt my lesson?"

"So hard, so hard!" moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.

"Who taught me to be hard?" returned Estella. "Who praised me when I
learnt my lesson?"

"But to be proud and hard to me!" Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as she
stretched out her arms. "Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud and hard
to me!"

Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but was
not otherwise disturbed; when the moment was past, she looked down at
the fire again.

"I cannot think," said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence "why
you should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a separation.
I have never forgotten your wrongs and their causes. I have never been
unfaithful to you or your schooling. I have never shown any weakness
that I can charge myself with."

"Would it be weakness to return my love?" exclaimed Miss Havisham. "But
yes, yes, she would call it so!"

"I begin to think," said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment
of calm wonder, "that I almost understand how this comes about. If you
had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of
these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as
the daylight by which she had never once seen your face,--if you had
done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the
daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and
angry?"

Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and
swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.

"Or,