“I am going on, Mr. Headstone, don’t you be afraid. I am going on to the end, and I have told you beforehand what the end is. Now, you know my story. You are as well aware as I am, that I have had many disadvantages to leave behind me in life. You have heard me mention my father, and you are sufficiently acquainted with the fact that the home from which I, as I may say, escaped, might have been a more creditable one than it was. My father died, and then it might have been supposed that my way to respectability was pretty clear. No. For then my sister begins.”

He spoke as confidently, and with as entire an absence of any telltale colour in his cheek, as if there were no softening old time behind him. Not wonderful, for there was none in his hollow empty heart. What is there but self, for selfishness to see behind it?