he 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.

I had jogged on, with that peculiar gravity age brings to equine
hoofs, about a mile, when the buttress of a thick wall came into view
abutting on the lane, and perched thereon what at first I deemed a
coloured figment of the mist that festooned the branches and clung
along the turf. But when I drew near I saw it was indeed a child, pink
and gold and palest blue. And she raised changeling hands at me, and
laughed and danced and chattered like the drops upon a waterfall; and
clear as if a tiny bell had jingled I heard her cry.

And my heart smote me heavily since I had of my own courtesy not
remembered Adele.

IV

_Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, tu-witta-woo._

--THOMAS NASH.

It was yet early, and refreshing in the chequered shade. We plodded
earnestly after our gaunt shadow in the dust, and ever downward, till
at last we drew so near to the opposite steep that I could well nigh
count its pines.

It was about the hour when birds seek shade and leave but few among
their fellows to sing, that at a stone's