My studies were not directed in any professional channel, but were pursued with a view to my being equal to any emergency when my expectations, which I had been told to look forward to, were fulfilled.
Estella was often in London, and I met her at many houses, and was desperately in love with her. But though she treated me with friendship, she was proud and capricious as ever, and a few years later married a man whom I knew and detested--a Mr. Bentley Drummle, a bully and a scoundrel.
When I was three-and-twenty I happened to be alone one night in our chambers reading, for I had a taste for books. Herbert was away at Marseilles on a business journey.
The clocks had struck eleven, and I closed my books. I was still listening to the clocks, when I heard a footstep on the staircase, and started. The staircase lights were blown out by the wind, and I took my reading-lamp and went out to see who it was.
"There is someone there, is there not?" I called out. "What floor do you want?"
"The top--Mr. Pip."
"That is my name. There is nothing the matter?"
"Nothing the matter," returned the voice. And the man came on.
I made out that the man was roughly but substantially dressed; that he had iron-grey hair; that his age was about sixty; that he was a muscular man, hardened by exposure to weather. I saw nothing that in the least explained him, but I saw that he was holding out both his hands to me.
I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me. I knew my convict, in spite of the intervening years, as distinctly as I knew him in the churchyard when we first stood face to face.