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Pip's abject leave-taking of Miss Havisham, during which he kneels to kiss her hand, signalizes his homage to a supposed patroness who seems to be opening up for him a new world of glamour ; ;

when, on the journey to London that immediately follows, he pauses nostalgically to lay his hand upon the finger-post at the end of the village, the wooden pointer symbolically designates a spiritual frontier between innocence and the corruption of worldly vanity.

Incidentally, one cannot miss the significance of this gesture, for Dickens reintroduces it associatively in Pip's mind at another moral and psychological crisis -- his painful recognition, in a talk with Herbert Pocket, that his hopeless attachment to Estella is as self-destructive as it is romantic.

In both cases the finger-post represents Pip's heightened awareness of contrary magnetisms.