of the nursery.

Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four o'clock,
and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard
the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and
the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees
cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of
humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers
of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be
so; what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself
to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or
was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting
bourne? In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried;
and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with
gathering dread. I could not remember him; but I knew that he was
my own uncle -- my mother's brother -- that he had taken me when
a parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he
had required a promise of Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain
me as one of her own children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she
had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her
nature would permit her; but how could she really like an interloper
not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband's
death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself
bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to
a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien
permanently intruded on her own family group.

A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not -- never doubted
-- that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly;
and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls