waft
of wind roaming fitful among the trees round Thornfield, a mile distant;
and when I glanced down in the direction of the murmur, my eye,
traversing the hall-front, caught a light kindling in a window: it
reminded me that I was late, and I hurried on.

I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to
return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome
staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil
Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only,
was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,--to slip
again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still
existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I
was becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have done me
at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling
life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for
the calm amidst which I now repined! Yes, just as much good as it would
do a man tired of sitting still in a "too easy chair" to take a long
walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances,
as it would be under his.

I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and
forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I
could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn
from the gloomy house--from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as
it appeared to me--to that sky expanded before me,--a blue sea absolved
from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb
seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had
come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark
in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling
stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow
when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck
in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-
door, and went in.

The hall was not dark, nor yet was it lit, only by the high-hung bronze
lamp; a warm glow suffused both it and the lower steps of the oak
staircase. This ruddy shine issued from the great dining-room, whose two-
leaved door stood open, and showed a genial fire in the grate, glancing
on marble hearth and brass fire-irons, and revealing purple draperies