“You may bring the letters,” she repeats in the same tone, “if you —­please.”

“It shall be done.  I wish your ladyship good day.”

On a table near her is a rich bauble of a casket, barred and clasped like an old strong-chest.  She, looking at him still, takes it to her and unlocks it.

“Oh!  I assure your ladyship I am not actuated by any motives of that sort,” says Mr. Guppy, “and I couldn’t accept anything of the kind.  I wish your ladyship good day, and am much obliged to you all the same.”

So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs, where the supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called upon to leave his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out.

As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, the very portraits frown, the very armour stir?

No.  Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint vibration to Sir Leicester’s ears; and yet this cry is in the house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees.

“O 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!  O my child, O my child!”

CHAPTER XXX

Esther’s Narrative

Richard had been gone away some time when a visitor came to pass a few days with us.  It was an elderly lady.  It was Mrs. Woodcourt, who, having come from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger and having written to my guardian, “by her son Allan’s desire,” to report that she had heard from him and that he was well “and sent his kind remembrances to all of us,” had been invited by my guardian to make a visit to Bleak House.  She stayed with us nearly three weeks.  She took very kindly to me and was extremely confidential, so much so that sometimes she almost made me uncomfortable.  I had no right, I knew very well, to be uncomfortable because she confided in me, and I felt it was unreasonable; still, with all I could do, I could not quite help it.

She was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with her hands folded in each other looking so very watchful while she talked to me that perhaps I found that rather irksome.  Or perhaps it was her being so upright and trim, though I don’t think it was that, because I thought that quaintly pleasant.  Nor can it have been the general expression of her face, which was very sparkling and pretty for an old lady.  I don’t know what it was.  Or at least if I do now, I thought I did not then.  Or at least—­but it don’t matter.