But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adele and Pilot —­ ran a race with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock.  When we went in, and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her on my knee; kept her there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she liked:  not rebuking even some little freedoms and trivialities into which she was apt to stray when much noticed, and which betrayed in her a superficiality of character, inherited probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an English mind.  Still she had her merits; and I was disposed to appreciate all that was good in her to the utmost.  I sought in her countenance and features a likeness to Mr. Rochester, but found none:  no trait, no turn of expression announced relationship.  It was a pity:  if she could but have been proved to resemble him, he would have thought more of her.

It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the night, that I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me.  As he had said, there was probably nothing at all extraordinary in the substance of the narrative itself:  a wealthy Englishman’s passion for a French dancer, and her treachery to him, were everyday matters enough, no doubt, in society; but there was something decidedly strange in the paroxysm of emotion which had suddenly seized him when he was in the act of expressing the present contentment of his mood, and his newly revived pleasure in the old hall and its environs.  I meditated wonderingly on this incident; but gradually quitting it, as I found it for the present inexplicable, I turned to the consideration of my master’s manner to myself.  The confidence he had thought fit to repose in me seemed a tribute to my discretion:  I regarded and accepted it as such.  His deportment had now for some weeks been more uniform towards me than at the first.  I never seemed in his way; he did not take fits of chilling hauteur:  when he met me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed welcome; he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me:  when summoned by formal invitation to his presence, I was honoured by a cordiality of reception that made me feel I really possessed the power to amuse him, and that these evening conferences were sought as much for his pleasure as for my benefit.

I, indeed, talked comparatively little, but I heard him talk with relish.  It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion.