No, alas! too plainly was this conspicuous when, on entering the
library, we found Mr. Rochester--alone! The envied possessor of
all this opulence can be no happy man. He was seated with his head
bent on his folded arms, and when he looked up a morose--almost a
malignant--scowl blackened his features! Hastily beckoning to the
governess, who entered with us, to follow him, he exclaimed, "Oh,
hang it all!" in an accent of despair, and rushed from the chamber.
We distinctly heard the doors clanging behind him as he flew! At
dinner, the same hollow reserve; his conversation entirely confined
to the governess (a Miss Eyre), whose position here your Catherine
does not understand, and to whom I distinctly heard him observe
that Miss Blanche Ingram was "an extensive armful."

The evening was spent in the lugubrious mockery of pretending to
consult an old gipsy-woman who smoked a short black pipe, and was
recognised BY ALL as Mr. Rochester in disguise. I was conducted by
Miss Eyre to my bedroom--through a long passage, narrow, low, and
dim, with two rows of small black doors, all shut; 'twas like a
corridor in some Blue Beard's castle. "Hurry, hurry, I hear the
chains rattling," said this strange girl; whose position, my
Eleanor, in this house causes your Catherine some natural
perplexity. When we had reached my chamber, "Be silent, silent as
death," said Miss Eyre, her finger on her lip and her meagre body
convulsed with some mysterious emotion. "Speak not of what you
hear, do not remember what you see!" and she was gone.

I undressed, after testing the walls for secret panels and looking
for assassins in the usual place, but was haunted all the time by
an unnatural sound of laughter. At length, groping my way to the
bed, I jumped hastily in, and would have sought some suspension of