“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham.  “You are not afraid of a woman who has not seen the sun since you were born?”

I regret to say that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie comprehended in the answer, “No.”

“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands on her left side.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What do I touch?”

“Your heart.”

“Broken.”

She said the word eagerly, and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it.

“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham.  “I have a sick fancy that I want to see some play.  I want diversion, and I have done with men and women.  There, there,” with an impatient movement of the fingers of her right hand, “play, play, play!”

For a moment, with the fear of my sister “working me” before my eyes, I had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed character of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise cart.  But I felt so unequal to the performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, and presently she said: 

“Are you sullen and obstinate?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.  “I am very sorry for you and very sorry I can’t play just now.  If you complain of me, I shall get into trouble with my sister, so I would do it, if I could, but it’s new here, and so strange and so fine, and—­melancholy.”  I stopped, fearing I might have said too much, and we took another look at each other.  Before she spoke again, she looked at herself in the glass, then she turned, and flashing a look at me, said, “Call Estella.  You can do that.  Call Estella.  At the door.”

To stand in the dark in the mysterious passage of an unknown house, bawling “Estella” to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty to roar out her name, was almost as bad as playing to order.  But she answered at last, and her light came trembling along the dark passage, like a star.  Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close to her, took up a jewel, and tried its effect against the pretty brown hair.  “Your own, one day, my dear,” she said, “and you will use it well.  Let me see you play cards with this boy.”

“With this boy!  Why, he is a common labouring boy!” then she asked, with greatest disdain, “What do you play, boy?”

“Nothing but ‘beggar my neighbour,’ miss.”

“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella.  So we sat down to cards, and Miss Havisham sat, corpse-like, watching as we played.

“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy,” said Estella, with disdain, before the first game was out.  “And what coarse hands he has, and what thick boots!”

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before, but now I began to notice them.  Her contempt for me was so strong that I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt.  I misdealt, as was only natural, when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong, and she denounced me for a clumsy, stupid, labouring boy.