she had actually put the question to Mr. Rochester as to when
he was going to bring his bride home; but he had answered
her only by a joke, and one of his queer looks, and she could
not tell what to make of him.

One thing specially surprised me, and that was, there were
no journeyings backward and forward, no visits to Ingram
Park: to be sure it was twenty miles off, on the borders of
another county; but what was that distance to an ardent
lover? To so practised and indefatigable a horseman as Mr.
Rochester it would be but a morning's ride. I began to cher-
ish hopes I had no right to conceive: that the match was
broken off; that rumour had been mistaken; that one or both
parties had changed their minds. I used to look at my mas-
ter's face to see if it were sad or fierce; but I could not re-
member the time when it had been so uniformly clear of
clouds or evil feelings.

If, in the moments I and my pupil spent with him, I
lacked spirits and sank into inevitable dejection, he became
even gay. Never had he called me more frequently to his
presence; never been kinder to me when there -- and, alas!
never had I loved him so well.

A SPLENDID midsummer shone over England: skies so
pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long suc-
cession, seldom favour, even singly, our wave-girt land. It
was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South,
like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest
them on the cliffs of Albion. The hay was all got in; the
fields round Thornfield were green and shorn; the roads white
and baked; the trees were in their dark prime; hedge and
wood, full-leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the
sunny hue of the cleared meadows between.

On Midsummer-eve, Adèle, weary with gathering wild
strawberries in Hay Lane half the day, had gone to bed with
the sun. I watched her drop asleep, and when I left her I
sought the garden.

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