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benevolent presence, and meeting his kind eyes, and feeling so
happy and so honoured there, and my heart so full--

I kissed his hand. I don't know what I said, or even that I spoke.
He was disconcerted and walked to the window; I almost believed
with an intention of jumping out, until he turned and I was
reassured by seeing in his eyes what he had gone there to hide. He
gently patted me on the head, and I sat down.

"There! There!" he said. "That's over. Pooh! Don't be foolish."

"It shall not happen again, sir," I returned, "but at first it is
difficult--"

"Nonsense!" he said. "It's easy, easy. Why not? I hear of a good
little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head
to be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my
good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is
there in all this? So, so! Now, we have cleared off old scores,
and I have before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again."

I said to myself, "Esther, my dear, you surprise me! This really
is not what I expected of you!" And it had such a good effect that
I folded my hands upon my basket and quite recovered myself. Mr.
Jarndyce, expressing his approval in his face, began to talk to me
as confidentially as if I had been in the habit of conversing with
him every morning for I don't know how long. I almost felt as if I
had.

"Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery
business?"

And of course I shook my head.

"I don't know who does," he returned. "The lawyers have twisted it
into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the
case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It's about
a will and the trusts under a will--or it was once. It's about
nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing,
and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and
arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting,
and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and
equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs.
That's the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary
means, has melted away."

"But it was, sir," said I, to bring him back, for he began to rub
his head, "about a will?"

"Why, yes, it was about a will when it was about anything," he
returned. "A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great
fortune, and made a great will. In the question how the trusts
under that will are to be administered, the fortune left by the
will is squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to
such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished
if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them,
and the will itself is made a dead letter. All through the
deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it, except one man,
knows already is referred to that only one man who don't know, it to
find out--all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have
copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated

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