Page:Jane Eyre (1st edition), Volume 3.djvu/136

 miles distant) this afternoon. Papa told me you had opened your school, and that the new mistress was come; and so I put on my bonnet after tea and ran up the valley to see her: this is she?" pointing to me.

"It is," said St. John.

"Do you think you shall like Morton?" she asked of me; with a direct and naive simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if child-like.

"I hope I shall. I have many inducements to do so."

"Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?"

"Quite."

"Do you like your house?"

"Very much."

"Have I furnished it nicely?"

"Very nicely indeed."

"And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?"

"You have indeed. She is teachable and handy." (This, then, I thought, is Miss Oliver, the heiress: favoured, it seems, in the gifts fo fortune, as well as in those of nature! What happy combination of the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?)

"I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes" she added. "It will be a change for me