It was a weak complaint to have made, and I had not meant to make it. I told her so, as she sat brooding after this outburst.

`Well, well, well!' she said. `What else?'

`I was liberally paid for my old attendance here,' I said, to soothe her, `in being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions only for my own information. What follows has another (and I hope more disinterested) purpose. In humouring my mistake, Miss Havisham, you punished - practised on - perhaps you will supply whatever term expresses your intention, without offence - your self-seeking relations?'

`I did. Why, they would have it so! So would you. What has been my history, that I should be at the pains of entreating either them, or you, not to have it so! You made your own snares. I never made them.'

Waiting until she was quiet again - for this, too, flashed out of her in a wild and sudden way - I went on.

`I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss Havisham, and have been constantly among them since I went to London. I know them to have been as honestly under my delusion as I myself. And I should be false and base if I did not tell you, whether it is acceptable to you or no, and whether you are inclined to give credence to it or no, that you deeply wrong both Mr Matthew Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose them to be otherwise than generous, upright, open, and incapable of anything designing or mean.'

`They are your friends,' said Miss Havisham.

`They made themselves my friends,' said I, `when they supposed me to have superseded them; and when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgiana, and Mistress Camilla, were not my friends, I think.'

This contrasting of them with the rest seemed, I was glad to see, to do them good with her. She looked at me keenly for a little while, and then said quietly:

`What do you want for them?'

`Only,' said I, `that you would not confound them with the others. They may be of the same blood, but, believe me, they are not of the same nature.'

Still looking at me keenly, Miss Havisham repeated:

`What do you want for them?'

`I am not so cunning, you see,' I said, in answer, conscious that I reddened a little, `as that I could hide from you, even if I desired, that I do want something. Miss Havisham, if you would spare the money to do my friend Herbert a lasting service in life, but which from the nature of the case must be done without his knowledge, I could show you how.'

`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