Afternoon in her chamber, Jane asks what she must do. Conscience answers at once: leave Thornfield. She wrestles with that verdict while Conscience, turned tyrant, holds Passion by the throat. Weak from fasting and isolation (no one has sent to ask after her), she stumbles out and is caught by Rochester, who has waited at her door. He carries her to the library, begs forgiveness, and Jane forgives him inwardly though she cannot say so.
She turns from his kiss and insists there is no claim on her. Adèle must have a new governess. Rochester calls Thornfield an accursed place and plans to shut it up; he asks her to come with him to a villa in the south of France as his wife in all but law. Jane refuses: his wife is living, and to live with him would make her his mistress.
When he threatens violence, she takes his clenched hand and listens. He tells his entire history: the arranged Jamaica marriage to Bertha Mason, her madness, confinement at Thornfield, years of wandering and mistresses he despises, and finding Jane on Hay Lane. He declares she is his sympathy and better self, denies Bertha was ever truly his wife, and asks her to promise she will be his. Jane answers: "Mr. Rochester, I will _not_ be yours." When conscience and reason turn traitor, she plants her foot: "_I_ care for myself," she will keep the law God and man have given. After he grips her and releases her, she walks back from the door, kneels, kisses his cheek, and blesses him before fleeing.
That night she dreams her mother speaks: "My daughter, flee temptation." She wakes before dawn, leaves Rochester's pearls, takes twenty shillings, oils the side-door lock, and slips out while he paces sleepless. She walks until she falls, boards a coach for all the money she has, and ends with a prayer that the reader may never feel such agony or dread being the instrument of evil to what they love.
