part with.

The Sunday evening was spent in repeating, by heart, the Church
Catechism, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew; and
in listening to a long sermon, read by Miss Miller, whose irrepressible
yawns attested her weariness. A frequent interlude of these performances
was the enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half-dozen of little
girls, who, overpowered with sleep, would fall down, if not out of the
third loft, yet off the fourth form, and be taken up half dead. The
remedy was, to thrust them forward into the centre of the schoolroom, and
oblige them to stand there till the sermon was finished. Sometimes their
feet failed them, and they sank together in a heap; they were then
propped up with the monitors' high stools.

I have not yet alluded to the visits of Mr. Brocklehurst; and indeed that
gentleman was from home during the greater part of the first month after
my arrival; perhaps prolonging his stay with his friend the archdeacon:
his absence was a relief to me. I need not say that I had my own reasons
for dreading his coming: but come he did at last.

One afternoon (I had then been three weeks at Lowood), as I was sitting
with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my eyes,
raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure just
passing: I recognised almost instinctively that gaunt outline; and when,
two minutes after, all the school, teachers included, rose _en masse_, it
was not necessary for me to look up in order to ascertain whose entrance
they thus greeted. A long stride measured the schoolroom, and presently
beside Miss Temple, who herself had risen, stood the same black column
which had frowned on me so ominously from the hearthrug of Gateshead. I
now glanced sideways at this piece of architecture. Yes, I was right: it
was Mr. Brocklehurst, buttoned up in a surtout, and looking longer,
narrower, and more rigid than ever.

I had my own reasons for being dismayed at this apparition; too well I
remembered the perfidious hints given by Mrs. Reed about my disposition,
&c.; the promise pledged by Mr. Brocklehurst to apprise Miss Temple and
the teachers of my vicious nature. All along I had been dreading the
fulfilment of this promise,--I had been looking out daily for the "Coming
Man," whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to
brand me as a bad child for ever: now there he was.

He stood at Miss Temple's side; he wa