“You are altogether a human being, Jane?  You are certain of that?”

“I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester.”

“Yet how, on this dark and doleful evening, could you so suddenly rise on my lone hearth?  I stretched my hand to take a glass of water from a hireling, and it was given me by you:  I asked a question, expecting John’s wife to answer me, and your voice spoke at my ear.”

“Because I had come in, in Mary’s stead, with the tray.”

“And there is enchantment in the very hour I am now spending with you.  Who can tell what a dark, dreary, hopeless life I have dragged on for months past?  Doing nothing, expecting nothing; merging night in day; feeling but the sensation of cold when I let the fire go out, of hunger when I forgot to eat:  and then a ceaseless sorrow, and, at times, a very delirium of desire to behold my Jane again.  Yes:  for her restoration I longed, far more than for that of my lost sight.  How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me?  Will she not depart as suddenly as she came?  To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more.”

A commonplace, practical reply, out of the train of his own disturbed ideas, was, I was sure, the best and most reassuring for him in this frame of mind.  I passed my finger over his eyebrows, and remarked that they were scorched, and that I would apply something which would make them grow as broad and black as ever.

“Where is the use of doing me good in any way, beneficent spirit, when, at some fatal moment, you will again desert me —­ passing like a shadow, whither and how to me unknown, and for me remaining afterwards undiscoverable?

“Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?”

“What for, Jane?”

“Just to comb out this shaggy black mane.  I find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand:  you talk of my being a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”

“Am I hideous, Jane?”

“Very, sir:  you always were, you know.”

“Humph!  The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever you have sojourned.”

“Yet I have been with good people; far better than you:  a hundred times better people; possessed of ideas and views you never entertained in your life:  quite more refined and exalted.”

“Who the deuce have you been with?”

“If you twist in that way you will make me pull the hair out of your head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my substantiality.”

“Who have you been with, Jane?”

“You shall not get it out of me to-night, sir; you must wait till to-morrow; to leave my tale half told, will, you know, be a sort of security that I shall appear at your breakfast table to finish it.  By the bye, I must mind not to rise on your hearth with only a glass of water then:  I must bring an egg at the least, to say nothing of fried ham.”

“You mocking changeling —­ fairy-born and human-bred!  You make me feel as I have not felt these twelve months.  If Saul could have had you for his David, the evil spirit would have been exorcised without the aid of the harp.”