a wish I had for
happy days to come: I was writing away very fast, though daylight was
fading from the leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two
yards off me. I looked at it. It was a little thing with a veil of
gossamer on its head. I beckoned it to come near me; it stood soon at my
knee. I never spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words; but I
read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless colloquy was to this
effect--

"It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to
make me happy: I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely
place--such as the moon, for instance--and it nodded its head towards her
horn, rising over Hay-hill: it told me of the alabaster cave and silver
vale where we might live. I said I should like to go; but reminded it,
as you did me, that I had no wings to fly.

"'Oh,' returned the fairy, 'that does not signify! Here is a talisman
will remove all difficulties;' and she held out a pretty gold ring. 'Put
it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours, and
you are mine; and we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.'
She nodded again at the moon. The ring, Adele, is in my breeches-pocket,
under the disguise of a sovereign: but I mean soon to change it to a ring
again."

"But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don't care for the fairy:
you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?"

"Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously. Whereupon I
told her not to mind his badinage; and she, on her part, evinced a fund
of genuine French scepticism: denominating Mr. Rochester "un vrai
menteur," and assuring him that she made no account whatever of his
"contes de fee," and that "du reste, il n'y avait pas de fees, et quand
meme il y en avait:" she was sure they would never appear to him, nor
ever give him rings, or offer to live with him in the moon.

The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing one to me. Mr.
Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse: there I was
ordered to choose half-a-dozen dresses. I hated the business, I begged
leave to defer it: no--it should be gone through with now. By dint of
entreaties expressed in energetic whispers, I reduced the half-dozen to
two: these however, he vowed he would select himself. With anxiety I
watched his eye rove over the gay stores: he fixed on a rich silk of the
most brilliant amethyst dye, and a superb pin