The chapter opens with the brilliance of spring: The world becomes green and fertile, bursting with "wild primrose plants." While Jane and her new friend, Mary Ann Wilson, happily enjoy this luxurious natural world, Lowood School has become marked with pestilence: Typhus is quickly killing half the girls in the school. Like the previous few chapters, this one emphasizes the contrast between the spiritual and material worlds through the characters of Helen and Jane.
Fifteen years later, Jane marks Helen's grave with a gray marble tablet labeled " Resurgam." Helen dies in Jane's arms, while the two girls sleep. During the two friends' final conversation, Helen insists she is happy, because she will escape great suffering by dying young. Jane feels she must embrace Helen one last time before she dies and sneaks into Miss Temple's room, where Helen has been staying during her illness. Jane doesn't realize the seriousness of this disease until she learns from the nurse that Helen will soon die. While Jane is enjoying nature's beauty with her new friend, Mary Ann Wilson, Helen Burns is slowly dying, not of typhus, but of consumption. Jane notes the contrast between the death within the school and the beauty of May outside its doors. The few who are well, including Jane, are allowed to play outside without supervision. Combined with semi-starvation and neglected colds, the dampness causes forty-five of the eighty students to fall ill with this dangerous disease.
The forest dell that nurtures the school, the "low wood," also brings a pestilence bred by dampness - typhus. But within this pleasure, there is also pain. Jane finds beauty in the natural world surrounding Lowood, a beauty that had been masked by winter's frosts. Spring arrives at Lowood, and the privations lessen.
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