ting her often, and bringing
her home sometimes. I took care she should never want for anything that
could contribute to her comfort: she soon settled in her new abode,
became very happy there, and made fair progress in her studies. As she
grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her
French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and
obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. By her
grateful attention to me and mine, she has long since well repaid any
little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her.

My tale draws to its close: one word respecting my experience of married
life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose names have most
frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have done.

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely
for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely
blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's
life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I
am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know
no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than
we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate
bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to
be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I
believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and
an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his
confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character--perfect
concord is the result.

Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps
it was that circumstance that drew us so very near--that knit us so very
close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.
Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw
nature--he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his
behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river,
cloud, sunbeam--of the landscape before us; of the weather round us--and
impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his
eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of
conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to
be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most
exquisite, even tho