o thanks to
you for it!'

The boy stopping again, he moved his eyes again.

'I am going on, Mr Headstone, don't you be afraid. I am going on to the
end, and I have told you beforehand what the end is. Now, you know my
story. You are as well aware as I am, that I have had many disadvantages
to leave behind me in life. You have heard me mention my father, and you
are sufficiently acquainted with the fact that the home from which I, as
I may say, escaped, might have been a more creditable one than it was.
My father died, and then it might have been supposed that my way to
respectability was pretty clear. No. For then my sister begins.'

He spoke as confidently, and with as entire an absence of any tell-tale
colour in his cheek, as if there were no softening old time behind him.
Not wonderful, for there WAS none in his hollow empty heart. What is
there but self, for selfishness to see behind it?

'When I speak of my sister, I devoutly wish that you had never seen
her, Mr Headstone. However, you did see her, and that's useless now. I
confided in you about her. I explained her character to you, and how she
interposed some ridiculous fanciful notions in the way of our being as
respectable as I tried for. You fell in love with her, and I favoured
you with all my might. She could not be induced to favour you, and so
we came into collision with this Mr Eugene Wrayburn. Now, what have you
done? Why, you have justified my sister in being firmly set against you
from first to last, and you have put me in the wrong again! And why
have you done it? Because, Mr Headstone, you are in all your passions
so selfish, and so concentrated upon yourself that you have not bestowed
one proper thought on me.'

The cool conviction with which the boy took up and held his position,
could have been derived from no other vice in human nature.

'It is,' he went on, actually with tears, 'an extraordinary circumstance
attendant on my life, that every effort I make towards perfect
respectability, is impeded by somebody else through no fault of mine!
Not content with doing what I have put before you, you will drag my name
into notoriety through dragging my sister's--which you are pretty sure
to do, if my suspicions have any foundation at all--and the worse you
prove to be, the harder it will be for me to detach myself from being
associated with you in people's minds.'

When he had dried his eyes and heaved a sob over his injuries, he began
moving to