“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me.  “She says many hard things of you, yet you say nothing of her.  What do you think of her?”

“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.

“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.

“I think she is very proud,” I replied in a whisper—­“and very pretty—­and very insulting.”

“Anything else?”

“I think I should like to go home.”

“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham aloud.  “Play the game out!” I played the game to an end, and Estella beggared me.

“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham.  “I know nothing of the days of the week or of the weeks of the year.  Come again after six days.  You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Estella, take him down.  Let him have something to eat, and let him roam about and look about him while he eats.  Go, Pip.”

I followed Estella down as I had followed her up, and at last I stood again in the glare of daylight which quite confounded me, for I felt as if I had been in the candle-light of the strange room many hours.

“You are to wait here, you boy, you,” said Estella, and disappeared in the house.  While she was gone I looked at my coarse hands and my common boots, and they troubled me greatly.

I determined to ask Joe why he had taught me to call the picture-cards Jacks.  I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.  Estella came back with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer which she set down as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace.  I was so humiliated and hurt that tears sprang to my eyes.  When she saw them she looked at me with a quick delight.  This gave me the power to keep them back and to look at her; then she gave a contemptuous toss of her head, and left me to my meal.  At first, so bitter were my feelings that, after she was gone, I hid behind one of the gates to the brewery and cried.  As I cried I kicked the wall and took a hard twist at my hair.  However, I came out from behind the gate, the bread and meat were acceptable and the beer was warm and tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me.  I had surveyed the rank old garden when Estella came back with the keys to let me out.  She gave me a triumphant look as she opened the gate.  I was passing out without looking at her, when she touched me with a taunting cry,——­

“Why don’t you cry?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“You do,” she said; “you have been crying and you are near crying now!” As she spoke she laughed, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me, and I set off on the four-mile walk home, pondering as I went along, on what I had seen and heard.

Of course, when I reached home they were very curious to know all about Miss Havisham’s, and asked many questions that I was not in a mood to answer.  The worst of it was that Uncle Pumblechook, devoured by curiosity, came gaping over too at tea-time to have the details divulged to him.  I was not in a good humour anyway that night, so the sight of my tormentors made me vicious in my reticence.