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Chapter 13

Mr. Rochester, it seems, by the surgeon's orders, went to bed early that night, nor did he rise soon next morning.

When he did come down, he was to attend to business, his agent, and some of his tenants were arrived and waiting to speak with him.

A deli-ni now had to vacate the library, it would be in daily requisition as a reception room for callers.

A fire was lit in an apartment upstairs, and there I carried our books, and arranged it for the future schoolroom.

I discerned in the course of the morning that Thornfield Hall was a changed place, no longer silent as a church, it echoed every hour or two to a knock at the door, or a clang of the bell.

Steps, too, often traversed the hall, and new voices spoke in different keys below. A will from the outer world was flowing through it, it had a master.

For my part, I liked it better.

A del was not easy to teach that day, she could not apply. She kept running to the door and looking over the banisters to see if she could get a glimpse of Mr. Rochester.

Then she coined pretext to go downstairs, in order, as I shrewdly suspected, to visit the library, where I knew she was not wanted.

Then, when I got a little angry and made her sit still, she continued to talk incessantly of her amie, Mosir, Edward, Fairfax, to Rochester, as she dubbed him.

I'd not before heard his pronouncements, and to conjecture what presence he had brought her. For it appears he had intimated the night before that when his luggage came from milk coat, there be found amongst it a little box in whose contents she had an interest.

I and my pupil dined as usual, and Mrs. Fairfax parlor, the afternoon was wild and snowy, and we passed it in the schoolroom.

At dark, I allowed a doubt to put away books and work, and to run downstairs. For, from the comparative silence below, and from the cessation of appeals to the doorbell, I conjectured that Mr. Rochester was now at liberty.

Left alone, I walked to the window, but nothing was to be seen thence, twilight and snowflakes together thickened the air, and hid the very shrubs on the lawn.

I let down the curtain, and went back to the fireside.

In the clear embers I was tracing a view, not unlike a picture I remembered to have seen of the castle of Heidelberg on the Rhine, when Mrs. Fairfax came in, breaking up by her entrance the firing mosaic, I had been piercing together.

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