I would for certain come one day and see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that for anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.

“It warn't easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn't safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held, for I was determined, and my mind firm made up.

At last I done it. Dear boy, I done it!”

I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I had seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than to him; even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices, though those were loud and his was silent.