n me, that I felt in
sending a gold half-guinea to Peggotty, per post, enclosed in this last
letter, to discharge the sum I had borrowed of her: in which epistle,
not before, I mentioned about the young man with the donkey-cart.

To these communications Peggotty replied as promptly, if not as
concisely, as a merchant's clerk. Her utmost powers of expression (which
were certainly not great in ink) were exhausted in the attempt to write
what she felt on the subject of my journey. Four sides of incoherent and
interjectional beginnings of sentences, that had no end, except blots,
were inadequate to afford her any relief. But the blots were more
expressive to me than the best composition; for they showed me that
Peggotty had been crying all over the paper, and what could I have
desired more?

I made out, without much difficulty, that she could not take quite
kindly to my aunt yet. The notice was too short after so long a
prepossession the other way. We never knew a person, she wrote; but to
think that Miss Betsey should seem to be so different from what she had
been thought to be, was a Moral!--that was her word. She was evidently
still afraid of Miss Betsey, for she sent her grateful duty to her but
timidly; and she was evidently afraid of me, too, and entertained the
probability of my running away again soon: if I might judge from the
repeated hints she threw out, that the coach-fare to Yarmouth was always
to be had of her for the asking.

She gave me one piece of intelligence which affected me very much,
namely, that there had been a sale of the furniture at our old home, and
that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were gone away, and the house was shut up,
to be let or sold. God knows I had no part in it while they remained
there, but it pained me to think of the dear old place as altogether
abandoned; of the weeds growing tall in the garden, and the fallen
leaves lying thick and wet upon the paths. I imagined how the winds
of winter would howl round it, how the cold rain would beat upon the
window-glass, how the moon would make ghosts on the walls of the empty
rooms, watching their solitude all night. I thought afresh of the grave
in the churchyard, underneath the tree: and it seemed as if the house
were dead too, now, and all connected with my father and mother were
faded away.

There was no other news in Peggotty's letters. Mr. Barkis was an
excellent husband, she said, though still a little near; but we all had
our faults,