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. O, 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."

She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I requested a

waiter who had been staring at the coach like a man who had never seen

such a thing in his life, to show us a private sitting-room. Upon that,

he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he

couldn't find the way up stairs, and led us to the black hole of the

establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous

article, considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,

and somebody's pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into

another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a scorched

leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust. Having looked at this

extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order; which,

proving to be merely, "Some tea for the lady," sent him out of the room

in a very low state of mind.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong

combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that

the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising

proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.

Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that

with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy

there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.) "Where are you going to, at Richmond?" I asked Estella.




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