From my discourse with Mr. Lloyd, and from the above reported fereween Bessie and Abbot, I gathered enough of hope to suffice as a motive for wishing to get well: a ge seemed near,—I desired and waited it in sile tarried, however: days and weeks passed: I had regained my normal state of health, but no new allusion was made to the subject over which I brooded. Mrs. Reed surveyed me at times with a severe eye, but seldom addressed me: since my illness, she had drawn a more marked line of separation than ever between me and her own children; appointing me a small closet to sleep in by myself, nio take my meals alone, and pass all my time in the nursery, while my cousins were stantly in the drawing-room. Not a hint, however, did she drop about sendio school: still I felt an instinctive certainty that she would not long endure me uhe same roof with her; for her glanow more than ever, when turned on me, expressed an insuperable and rooted aversion.
Eliza and Geiana, evidently ag acc to orders, spoke to me as little as possible: John thrust his tongue in his cheek whenever he saw me, and oempted chastisement; but as I instantly turned against him, roused by the same se of deep ire and desperate revolt which had stirred my corruption before, he thought it better to desist, and ran from me tittering execrations, and vowing I had burst his nose. I had indeed levelled at that promi feature as hard a blow as my knuckles could inflict; and when I saw that either that or my look daunted him, I had the greatest ination to follow up my advao purpose; but he was already with his mama. I heard him in a blubbering tone ehe tale of how 「that nasty Jane Eyre」 had flown at him like a mad cat: he was stopped rather harshly—
「Don』t talk to me about her, John: I told you not to go near her; she is not worthy of notice; I do not choose that either you or your sisters should associate with her.」
Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly, and without at all deliberating on my words—
「They are not fit to associate with me.」
Mrs. Reed was rather a stout woman; but, on hearing this strange and audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me like a whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge of my crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or utter one syllable during the remainder of the day.
「What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?」 was my scarcely voluntary demand. I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will senting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no trol.
「What?」 said Mrs. Reed under her breath: her usually cold posed grey eye became troubled with a look like fear; she took her hand from my arm, and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether I were child or fiend. I was now in for it.
「My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and see all you do and think; and so papa and mama: they know how you shut me up all day long, and how you wish me dead.」
Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits: she shook me most soundly, she boxed both my ears, and the me without a word. Bessie supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour』s length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof. I half believed her; for I felt indeed only bad feelings surging in my breast.
November, December, and half of January passed away. Christma