During these eight years my life was uniform:  but not unhappy, because it was not inactive.  I had the means of an excellent education placed within my reach; a fondness for some of my studies, and a desire to excel in all, together with a great delight in pleasing my teachers, especially such as I loved, urged me on:  I availed myself fully of the advantages offered me.  In time I rose to be the first girl of the first class; then I was invested with the office of teacher; which I discharged with zeal for two years:  but at the end of that time I altered.

Miss Temple, through all changes, had thus far continued superintendent of the seminary:  to her instruction I owed the best part of my acquirements; her friendship and society had been my continual solace; she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly, companion.  At this period she married, removed with her husband (a clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant county, and consequently was lost to me.

From the day she left I was no longer the same:  with her was gone every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a home to me.  I had imbibed from her something of her nature and much of her habits:  more harmonious thoughts:  what seemed better regulated feelings had become the inmates of my mind.  I had given in allegiance to duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content:  to the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.

But destiny, in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, came between me and Miss Temple:  I saw her in her travelling dress step into a post-chaise, shortly after the marriage ceremony; I watched the chaise mount the hill and disappear beyond its brow; and then retired to my own room, and there spent in solitude the greatest part of the half-holiday granted in honour of the occasion.

I walked about the chamber most of the time.  I imagined myself only to be regretting my loss, and thinking how to repair it; but when my reflections were concluded, and I looked up and found that the afternoon was gone, and evening far advanced, another discovery dawned on me, namely, that in the interval I had undergone a transforming process; that my mind had put off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple —­ or rather that she had taken with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity —­ and that now I was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions.  It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone:  it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was no more.  My world had for some years been in Lowood:  my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.