The single external event in her life at that time was a teaching engagement at Law Hill, of which all that is known certainly is that it continued for at least six months during 1837. Some scholars hold that it began in the fall of 1836, others that it continued well into 1838. There are traces of evidence to support both contentions, but whether it lasted six months or sixteen, it was, beyond question, Emily’s longest absence from Haworth till then. Following Hatfield’s dating of her poems, one can trace first the impact of new scenes (February 1837), nostalgia for the moors, and a wish to “be healthful still and turn away from passion’s call.” Then in sequence (how rapid one cannot say) come abysmal self-distrust; nightmare; melancholy; the agony of separation (November, 1837); more desperate melancholy (through 1838); and finally in late October and early November, 1838, two poems of passionate and bitter reproach to a faithless feminine love: “I knew not ’twas so dire a crime To say the word adieu,” and “Light up thy halls—and think not of me!” Whatever experience produced these intense, immediate and certainly autobiographical outcries must have occurred during a period when, as a letter to Charlotte testifies, her boarding-school responsibilities absorbed her from six in the morning until sometimes eleven at night, and where supervision would have made association with a man impossible. In view of her earlier quick withdrawal from Roe Head, the fact that she endured such conditions for even six months is remarkable.