Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where suppliants for Mr. Jaggers’s notice were lingering about as usual, and I returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three hours on hand.  I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening I should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.  While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her.  I wished that Wemmick had not met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that, of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in my breath and on my clothes.  I beat the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs.  So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?

Chapter 33

In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes.  Her manner was more winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I saw Miss Havisham’s influence in the change.

We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her luggage to me, and when it was all collected I remembered — having forgotten everything but herself in the meanwhile — that I knew nothing of her destination.

“I am going to Richmond,” she told me.  “Our lesson is, that there are two Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine is the Surrey Richmond.  The distance is ten miles.  I am to have a carriage, and you are to take me.  This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out of it.  Oh, you must take the purse!  We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions.  We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I.”

As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an inner meaning in her words.  She said them slightingly, but not with displeasure.

“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella.  Will you rest here a little?”

“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and you are to take care of me the while.”