,
and Biddy helped him all she could.

Pip might have fallen in love with Biddy if he had not had Estella
always in his mind. Orlick, Joe's helper, indeed, thought he had done
so, and it made him hate Pip more than ever, for he was in love with
Biddy himself. He grew morose and quarrelsome and spoke so roughly to
Mrs. Joe one day that she was not satisfied till the blacksmith took off
his singed apron and knocked the surly Orlick flat in the coal dust.

This was a costly revenge for Mrs. Joe, however. Orlick never forgave
it, and a few nights after, when no one was at home but herself he crept
in behind her in the kitchen and struck her a terrible blow on the head
with a piece of iron.

Hours afterward Joe found her lying senseless, and though she lived to
recover a part of her senses, she never scolded or spoke again. She grew
well enough at last to sit all day in her chair, but was so helpless
that Biddy came to the house to be her nurse. It chanced that a prisoner
had escaped from the prison-boats on the night Mrs. Joe was injured,
and he was thought to be the one who attacked her. But Pip suspected
Orlick all the while.

So time went on. Once a year, on his birthday, Pip went to see Miss
Havisham, but he never saw Estella there. And nothing else of particular
importance occurred till he had been for four years Joe's apprentice.

One night, as Pip sat with Joe before the fire in The Three Jolly
Bargemen, they were called out by a gentleman whom Pip remembered to
have seen once at Miss Havisham's. It was, as a matter of fact, Mr.
Jaggers, her lawyer, who had sent Estella to her as a baby.

The lawyer walked home with them, for he had a wonderful piece of news
to relate. It was that an unknown benefactor, whose name he was not
permitted to tell, intended when he died to leave Pip a fortune. In the
meantime he wished to have him educated to become a gentleman, and as a
lad of Great Expectations, and, the better to accomplish this, he wished
Pip to go without delay to London.

This great good fortune seemed so marvelous that Pip could hardly
believe it. He had never imagined Miss Havisham intended to befriend
him, but now he guessed at once that she was this unknown benefactor.
And he jumped next to another conclusion even more splendid--that she
intended him sometime to marry Estella and was even then educating her
for him. Pip went home almost in a dream, too full of his own prospects
to see how sad Biddy was b