ester, I will love you and live with you through life till
death," and a fount of rapture would spring to my lips. I thought of
this.

That kind master, who could not sleep now, was waiting with impatience
for day. He would send for me in the morning; I should be gone. He
would have me sought for: vainly. He would feel himself forsaken; his
love rejected: he would suffer; perhaps grow desperate. I thought of
this too. My hand moved towards the lock: I caught it back, and glided
on.

Drearily I wound my way downstairs: I knew what I had to do, and I did it
mechanically. I sought the key of the side-door in the kitchen; I
sought, too, a phial of oil and a feather; I oiled the key and the lock.
I got some water, I got some bread: for perhaps I should have to walk
far; and my strength, sorely shaken of late, must not break down. All
this I did without one sound. I opened the door, passed out, shut it
softly. Dim dawn glimmered in the yard. The great gates were closed and
locked; but a wicket in one of them was only latched. Through that I
departed: it, too, I shut; and now I was out of Thornfield.

A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the contrary
direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often noticed,
and wondered where it led: thither I bent my steps. No reflection was to
be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward.
Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The
first was a page so heavenly sweet--so deadly sad--that to read one line
of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was
an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.

I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise. I believe it
was a lovely summer morning: I know my shoes, which I had put on when I
left the house, were soon wet with dew. But I looked neither to rising
sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature. He who is taken out to pass
through a fair scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers that
smile on his road, but of the block and axe-edge; of the disseverment of
bone and vein; of the grave gaping at the end: and I thought of drear
flight and homeless wandering--and oh! with agony I thought of what I
left. I could not help it. I thought of him now--in his room--watching
the sunrise; hoping I should soon come to say I would stay with him and
be his. I longed to be his; I panted