“Why must it be done without his knowledge?” she asked, settling her hands upon her stick, that she might regard me the more attentively.

“Because,” said I, “I began the service myself, more than two years ago, without his knowledge, and I don’t want to be betrayed.  Why I fail in my ability to finish it, I cannot explain.  It is a part of the secret which is another person’s and not mine.”

She gradually withdrew her eyes from me, and turned them on the fire.  After watching it for what appeared in the silence and by the light of the slowly wasting candles to be a long time, she was roused by the collapse of some of the red coals, and looked towards me again — at first, vacantly — then, with a gradually concentrating attention.  All this time, Estella knitted on.  When Miss Havisham had fixed her attention on me, she said, speaking as if there had been no lapse in our dialogue: 

“What else?”

“Estella,” said I, turning to her now, and trying to command my trembling voice, “you know I love you.  You know that I have loved you long and dearly.”

She raised her eyes to my face, on being thus addressed, and her fingers plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance.  I saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her, and from her to me.

“I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake.  It induced me to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another.  While I thought you could not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it.  But I must say it now.”

Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going, Estella shook her head.

“I know,” said I, in answer to that action; “I know.  I have no hope that I shall ever call you mine, Estella.  I am ignorant what may become of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go.  Still, I love you.  I have loved you ever since I first saw you in this house.”

Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her head again.

“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did.  But I think she did not.  I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.”

I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.

“It seems,” said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments, fancies — I don’t know how to call them — which I am not able to comprehend.  When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more.  You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there.  I don’t care for what you say at all.  I have tried to warn you of this; now, have I not?”

I said in a miserable manner, “Yes.”