The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and him I understood to be Mr. Camilla.  He came to the rescue at this point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”

“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my dear.”

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry brown corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut shells, and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers, supported this position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear.  Hem!”

“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.

“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to rise from her legs to her bosom.  “It’s all very true!  It’s a weakness to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it.  No doubt my health would be much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t change my disposition if I could.  It’s the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.”  Here another burst of feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going round and round the room:  now, brushing against the skirts of the visitors:  now, giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla.  “Never mixing with any natural ties, never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is!  I have taken to the sofa with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours, insensible, with my head over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know where—­”

("Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)

“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”

“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.

“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to thank you, my love?”

“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the pianoforte-tuner’s across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance-and now to be told—.”  Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical as to the formation of new combinations there.

When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and herself, and stood looking at the speaker.  This change had a great influence in bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.