She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after her
release: "There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas
and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from
what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is
tamed down and broken."

At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her. She must have
seen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and done
violence to her destiny.

She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turned
even the tragedy of her family to account. Everything conspired to keep
her there. The school was given up. She tells why. "It is on Papa's
account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell
you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I
ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too
selfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to
pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God I will try to
deny myself in this matter, and to wait."

And with the help of God she waited.

There are three significant entries in Emily's sealed paper for
eighteen-forty-five. "Now I don't desire a school at all, and none of us
have any great longing for it." "I am quite contented for myself ...
seldom or never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring that
everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and
then we should have a very tolerable world of it." "I have plenty of
work on hand, and writing...." This, embedded among details of an
incomparable innocence: "We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lost