ortsmouth to a person in London, for
particulars of your address. That person's name? Why, Wemmick."

I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life.
I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where
I seemed to be suffocating,--I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I
grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught
me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on one
knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I
shuddered at, very near to mine.

"Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has
done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea
should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec'lated and got
rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth;
I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I
tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to
know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head
so high that he could make a gentleman,--and, Pip, you're him!"

The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
he had been some terrible beast.

"Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son,--more to me
nor any son. I've put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a
hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of
sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces wos like, I see
yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my
dinner or my supper, and I says, 'Here's the boy again, a looking at
me whiles I eats and drinks!' I see you there a many times, as plain as
ever I see you on them misty marshes. 'Lord strike me dead!' I says each
time,--and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens,--'but
wot, if I gets liberty and money, I'll make that boy a gentleman!' And
I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings
o'yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for
wagers, and beat 'em!"

In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly
fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one
grain of relief I had.

"Look'ee here!" he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and
turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I