my own accord. Stay! I have it here—it is always more satisfactory to see important points written down, fairly committed to black and
And the pocketbook was again deliberately produced, opened, sought through; from one of its compartments was extracted a shabby slip of paper, hastily torn off: I recognised in its texture and its stains of ultramarine, and lake, and vermillion, the ravished margin of the portrait-cover.
He got up, held it close to my eyes: and I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words “Jane Eyre”—the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction.
“Briggs wrote to me of a Jane Eyre:” he said, “the advertisements demanded a Jane Eyre: I knew a Jane Elliott.—I confess I had my suspicions, but it was only yesterday afternoon they were at once resolved into certainty. You own the name and renounce the alias ?”