knees in the empty room with sobs, crying:

"Oh, my child! My child! Not dead in the first hours of her life, as my
cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had
renounced me and my name! Oh, my child! My child!"

III

LITTLE JOE PLAYS A PART

While these events, which so closely concerned Esther, were occurring in
London, life at Bleak House went quietly on. Ada and Esther had become
bosom friends, and both loved and respected Mr. Jarndyce above every
one. Harold Skimpole, as charming and careless as ever, and as willing
as ever that some one else should pay his debts for him, was often
there, and whenever they went to the city they saw Miss Flite and Mrs.
Jellyby, the latter still busily sending letters about the growing of
coffee and the education of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.

Esther grew especially to like Caddy, the slipshod daughter to whom Mrs.
Jellyby dictated her letters. The poor girl had much good in her, and
Esther encouraged and helped her all she could. Caddy finally fell in
love with Prince Turveydrop, a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired young man whose
father kept a dancing school.

Old Mr. Turveydrop, his father, was a fat man with a false complexion,
false teeth, false whiskers, a wig and a padded chest. He always carried
a cane, eye-glass and snuff-box and was so tightly buttoned up that when
he bowed you could almost see creases come into the whites of his eyes.
He thought himself a model of politeness and stood about to show off his
clothes while he made his son, Prince, do all the teaching.

Caddy was so tired of hearing about Africa that at last she married
Prince and moved into the Turveydrop dancing school, and Mrs. Jellyby
had to hire a boy to help her with her great plans for the education of
the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.

Once Esther and Ada went with Mr. Jarndyce to visit Mr. Boythorn--the
man with the tremendous laugh and the pet canary--at his country house
where he lived in one perpetual quarrel with his neighbor, Sir Leicester
Dedlock. Esther had often heard of the beauty of Lady Dedlock, and one
Sunday in the village church she saw her. There was something strangely
familiar in her look that reminded Esther of her godmother. An odd
sensation came over her then and she felt her heart beat quickly. But
this was before Lady Dedlock had guessed the truth, and Esther and she
did not meet.

Richard Carstone had soon begun to be a source of great anxiety to all
a