I crossed the room and looked out into the night.  The brightening moon hung golden in the dark clearness of the sky.  Mr. Rochester stood motionless, Napoleon-wise, beneath the black, unstirring foliage.  And before I could turn, Jane had begun to sing:—­

      You take my heart with tears;
      I battle uselessly;
    Reft of all hopes and doubts and fears,
        Lie quietly.

      You veil my heart with cloud;
      Since faith is dim and blind,
    I can but grope perplex’d and bow’d,
        Seek till I find.

      Yet bonds are life to me;
      How else could I perceive
    The love in each wild artery
        That bids me live?

Jane’s was not a rich voice, nor very sweet, and yet I fancied no other voice than this could plead and argue quite so clearly and with such nimble insistency—­neither of bird, nor child, nor brook; because, I suppose, it was the voice of Jane Eyre, and all that was Jane’s seemed Jane’s only.

The music ceased, the accompaniment died away; but Mr. Rochester stood immobile yet—­a little darker night in that much deeper.  When I turned, Jane was gone from the room.  I sat down, my face towards the still candles, as one who is awake, yet dreams on.  The faint scent of the earth through the open window; the heavy, sombre furniture; the daintiness and the alertness in the many flowers and few womanly gew-gaws:  these too I shall remember in a tranquillity that cannot change.

A sudden, trembling glimmer at the window lit the garden and, instantaneously, the distant hills; lit also the figures of Jane and Mr. Rochester beneath the trees.  They entered the house, and once more Jane drew the bolts against that phantom fear.  A tinge of scarlet stood in her cheeks, an added lustre in her eyes.  They were strange lovers, these two—­like frost upon a cypress tree; yet summer lay all around us.

I bade them good night and ascended to the little room prepared for me.  There was a great pincushion on the sprigged and portly toilet table, and I laboured till the constellations had changed beyond my window, in printing from a box of tiny pins upon that lavendered mound, “Ave, Ave, atque Vale!”

Far in the night a dreadful sound woke me.  I rose and looked out of the window, and heard again, deep and reverberating, Pilot baying I know not what light minions of the moon.  The Great Bear wheeled faintly clear in the dark zenith, but the borders of the east were grey as glass; and far away a fierce hound was answering from his echo-place in the gloom, as if the dread dog of Acheron kept post upon the hills.

A light tap woke me in the sunlight, and a lighter voice.  Mr. Rochester took breakfast with us in a gloomy old dressing-room, moody and taciturn, unpacified by sleep.  But Jane, whimsical and deft, had tied a yellow ribbon in the darkness of her hair.

Rosinante awaited me at the little green gate, eyeing forlornly the steep valley at her feet.  And I rode on.  The gate was shut on me; and Mr. Rochester again, perhaps, at his black ease.