is wife; certainly I would not write unknown to
her.' 'She said this,' Miss Wheelwright adds, 'with the sincerity of
manner which characterised her every utterance, and I would sooner have
doubted myself than her.' Let, then, this silly and offensive imputation
be now and for ever dismissed from the minds of Charlotte Bronte's
admirers, if indeed it had ever lodged there. {110}

Charlotte had not visited the Wheelwrights in the Rue Royale during her
first visit to Brussels. She had found the companionship of Emily
all-sufficing, and Emily was not sufficiently popular with the
Wheelwrights to have made her a welcome guest. They admitted her
cleverness, but they considered her hard, unsympathetic, and abrupt in
manner. We know that she was self-contained and homesick, pining for her
native moors. This was not evident to a girl of ten, the youngest of the
Wheelwright children, who was compelled to receive daily a music lesson
from Emily in her play-hours. When, however, Charlotte came back to
Brussels alone she was heartily welcomed into two or three English
families, including those of Mr. Dixon, of the Rev. Mr. Jenkins, and of
Dr. Wheelwright. With the Wheelwright children she sometimes spent the
Sunday, and with them she occasionally visited the English Episcopal
church which the Wheelwrights attended, and of which the clergyman was a
Mr. Drury. When Dr. Wheelwright took his wife for a Rhine trip in May he
left his four children--one little girl had died at Brussels, aged seven,
in the preceding November--in the care of Madame Heger at the Pensionnat,
and under the immediate supervision of Charlotte.

At this period there was plenty of cheerfulness in her life. She was
learning German. She was giving English lessons to M. Heger and to his
brother-in-law, M. Chappelle. She went to the Carnival, and described it
'animating to see the immense crowds and the general gaiety.' 'Whenever
I turn back,' she writes, 'to compare what I am with what I was, my place
here with my place at Mrs. Sidgwick's or Mrs. White's, I am thankful.'

In a letter to her brother, however, we find the darker side of the
picture. It reveals many things apart from what is actually written
down. In this, the only letter to Branwell that I have been able to
discover, apart from one written in childhood, it appears that the
brother and sister are upon very confidential terms. Up to this time, at
any rate, Branwell's conduct had not excit