“Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be: let her—” he stopped and burst into tears.

“I do my best; and have done it, and will do it,” was the answer: he shut up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away.

“Yet would to God there was an end of all this!” added Mr. Rochester, as he closed and barred the heavy yard-gates.

This done, he moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a door in the wall bordering the orchard. I, supposing he had done with me, prepared to return to the house; again, however, I heard him call “Jane!” He had opened the portal and stood at it, waiting for me.

“Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments,” he said; “that house is a mere dungeon: don’t you feel it so?”

“It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir.”

“The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,” he answered; “and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now _here_” (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) “all is real, sweet, and pure.”