I kissed his hand.  I don’t know what I said, or even that I spoke.  He was disconcerted and walked to the window; I almost believed with an intention of jumping out, until he turned and I was reassured by seeing in his eyes what he had gone there to hide.  He gently patted me on the head, and I sat down.

“There!  There!” he said.  “That’s over.  Pooh!  Don’t be foolish.”

“It shall not happen again, sir,” I returned, “but at first it is difficult—­”

“Nonsense!” he said.  “It’s easy, easy.  Why not?  I hear of a good little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector.  She grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend.  What is there in all this?  So, so!  Now, we have cleared off old scores, and I have before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again.”

I said to myself, “Esther, my dear, you surprise me!  This really is not what I expected of you!” And it had such a good effect that I folded my hands upon my basket and quite recovered myself.  Mr. Jarndyce, expressing his approval in his face, began to talk to me as confidentially as if I had been in the habit of conversing with him every morning for I don’t know how long.  I almost felt as if I had.

“Of course, Esther,” he said, “you don’t understand this Chancery business?”

And of course I shook my head.

“I don’t know who does,” he returned.  “The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth.  It’s about a will and the trusts under a will—­or it was once.  It’s about nothing but costs now.  We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs.  That’s the great question.  All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.”

“But it was, sir,” said I, to bring him back, for he began to rub his head, “about a will?”

“Why, yes, it was about a will when it was about anything,” he returned.  “A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great fortune, and made a great will.  In the question how the trusts under that will are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made a dead letter.  All through the deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it, except one man, knows already is referred to that only one man who don’t know, it to find out—­all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have copies, over and over again, of everything