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“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.

After asking a number of questions with no satisfaction, Uncle Pumblechook began again.

“Now, boy,” he said, “what was Miss Havisham a-doing of when you went in to-day?”

“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”

My hearers stared at one another–as they well might–and repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”

“Yes,” said I, “and Miss Estella, that’s her niece, I think, handed her in cake and wine at the coach window on a gold plate. And we all had cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine because she told me to.”

“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.

“Four dogs,” said I.

“Large or small?”

“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal cutlets out of a silver basket.”

My hearers stared at one another again in utter amazement. I was perfectly frantic and would have told them anything.

“Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.

“In Miss Havisham’s room.” They stared again. “But there weren’t any horses to it.” I added this saving clause in the moment of rejecting four richly caparisoned coursers, which I had had wild thoughts of harnessing.

“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”

“I’ll tell you, mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is it is a sedan-chair. Well, boy, and what did you play at?”

“We played with flags,” I said.

“Flags!” echoed my sister.

“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out at the coach window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”