ge and the parting quietly half-an-hour or so, while the
stars enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder: here is the
chestnut tree: here is the bench at its old roots. Come, we will sit
there in peace to-night, though we should never more be destined to sit
there together." He seated me and himself.

"It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little
friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be
helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"

I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.

"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to
you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string
somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a
similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little
frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of
land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be
snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.
As for you,--you'd forget me."

"That I _never_ should, sir: you know--" Impossible to proceed.

"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood? Listen!"

In listening, I sobbed convulsively; for I could repress what I endured
no longer; I was obliged to yield, and I was shaken from head to foot
with acute distress. When I did speak, it was only to express an
impetuous wish that I had never been born, or never come to Thornfield.

"Because you are sorry to leave it?"

The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was
claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway, and asserting a right to
predominate, to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last: yes,--and to
speak.

"I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield:--I love it, because I
have lived in it a full and delightful life,--momentarily at least. I
have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been
buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion
with what is bright and energetic and high. I have talked, face to face,
with what I reverence, with what I delight in,--with an original, a
vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it
strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from
you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking
on the necessity of death."