`Dear Miss Havisham,' said Miss Sarah Pocket. `How well you look!'

`I do not,' returned Miss Havisham. `I am yellow skin and bone.'

Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, `Poor dear soul!' Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!'

`And how are you?' said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss Havisham wouldn't stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly obnoxious to Camilla.

`Thank you, Miss Havisham,' she returned, `I am as well as can be expected.'

`Why, what's the matter with you?' asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding sharpness.

`Nothing worth mentioning,' replied Camilla. `I don't wish to make a display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the night than I am quite equal to.'

`Then don't think of me,' retorted Miss Havisham.

`Very easily said!' remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. `Raymond is a witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night. Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive, I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I wish to could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night - The idea!' Here, a burst of tears.

The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and him I understood to be Mr Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, `Camilla, my dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.'

`I am not aware,' observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once, `that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my dear.'

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry brown corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut shells, and a large mouth like a cat's without the whiskers, supported this position by saying, `No, indeed, my dear. Hem!'

`Thinking is easy enough,' said the grave lady.

`What is easier, you know?' assented Miss Sarah Pocket.

`Oh, yes, yes!' cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to rise from her legs to her bosom. `It's all very true! It's a weakness to be so affectionate, but I can't help it. No doubt my health would be much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn't change my disposition if I could. It's the cause of much suffering, but it's a consolation to know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.' Here another burst of feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going round and round the room: now, brushing against the skirts of the visitors: now, giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

`There's Matthew!' said Camilla. `Never mixing with any natural ties, never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours, insensible, with my head over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don't know where--'