a respectable-looking, middle-aged man.

"You know Thornfield Hall, of course?" I managed to say at last.

"Yes, ma'am; I lived there once."

"Did you?" Not in my time, I thought: you are a stranger to me.

"I was the late Mr. Rochester's butler," he added.

The late! I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I had been
trying to evade.

"The late!" I gasped. "Is he dead?"

"I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward's father," he explained. I
breathed again: my blood resumed its flow. Fully assured by these words
that Mr. Edward--_my_ Mr. Rochester (God bless him, wherever he was!)--was
at least alive: was, in short, "the present gentleman." Gladdening
words! It seemed I could hear all that was to come--whatever the
disclosures might be--with comparative tranquillity. Since he was not in
the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the
Antipodes.

"Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?" I asked, knowing, of
course, what the answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring the
direct question as to where he really was.

"No, ma'am--oh, no! No one is living there. I suppose you are a
stranger in these parts, or you would have heard what happened last
autumn,--Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin: it was burnt down just about
harvest-time. A dreadful calamity! such an immense quantity of valuable
property destroyed: hardly any of the furniture could be saved. The fire
broke out at dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote,
the building was one mass of flame. It was a terrible spectacle: I
witnessed it myself."

"At dead of night!" I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality
at Thornfield. "Was it known how it originated?" I demanded.

"They guessed, ma'am: they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was
ascertained beyond a doubt. You are not perhaps aware," he continued,
edging his chair a little nearer the table, and speaking low, "that there
was a lady--a--a lunatic, kept in the house?"

"I have heard something of it."

"She was kept in very close confinement, ma'am: people even for some
years was not absolutely certain of her existence. No one saw her: they
only knew by rumour that such a person was at the Hall; and who or what
she was it was difficult to conjecture. They said Mr. Edward had brought
her from abroad, and some believed she had been his mistress. But a
queer thing happened a year since--a very queer thing."

I feared now t