It was eleven years before I returned to England. It was an evening in December, an hour or so after dark, when I quietly pushed open the kitchen door of the house on the marshes (沼泽). There, smoking his pipe by the fire, was Joe, only a little gray. And opposite him, sitting on my own old little stool, was — a little Pip.
Joe jumped up to welcome me back and kept touching me to make sure it was really me. But the little boy hung back. Biddy rushed in, crying, and kissed me.
After a few days, young Pip — for he had been named after me — and I became friends. We went for walks on the marshes, and I showed him my family's tombstones. To understand his thoughts and feelings, I had only to remember my own at his age in this place. By the time I left, Pip was as attached to me as I had been to Joe when I was young. He stood by the forge and waved and waved until I was out of sight.
Thoughts of Estella came rushing to me. Before leaving for London, I decided to visit the site of Miss Havisham's house. Nothing of the burned-out house remained; only the garden was there, pushing wildly into the space once occupied by the house. I went through the old gate, no longer locked, and sat on a stone bench. Thoughts of Estella came rushing to me. I had heard that her life with Bentley Drummle had been most unhappy, unhappy enough to cause her to leave him. And I had heard that he had been killed in a riding accident soon after. But that had been two years ago, and perhaps she had since remarried. I wandered farther back in the garden, which looked stripped and like desert in the winter air. The figure of a woman stood pitifully in the moonlight, and, hearing my footsteps, she turned. We recognized one another at the same time.
