A touch of pity for him mingled with her dislike of him, and she said: “ Mr. Headstone, I am grieved to have done you any harm, but I have never meant it.”

“There!” he cried, despairingly. “Now, I seem to have reproached you, instead of revealing to you the state of my own mind! Bear with me. I am always wrong when you are in question. It is my doom.”

Struggling with himself, and by times looking up at the deserted windows of the houses as if there could be anything written in their grimy panes that would help him, he paced the whole pavement at her side, before he spoke again.

“I must try to give expression to what is in my mind; it shall and must be spoken. Though you see me so confounded⁠—though you strike me so helpless⁠—I ask you to believe that there are many people who think well of me; that there are some people who highly esteem me; that I have in my way won a station which is considered worth winning.”