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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 to return: it was not too late; I could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement.

As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered.

I could go back and be his comforter-his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin.

Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment-far worse than my abandonment-how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in.

Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of love.

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