olonel durst no more take leave of him, than that turnkey durst ask him
his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and them, he
slips in his subordinate,--don't you see?--and so he has 'em, soul and
body."

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian's
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
first time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual, and I
returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three
hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my
mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud
and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence
of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not
met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that,
of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in
my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw
her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?

Chapter XXXIII

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