"Be sure, now—next Sunday night. Row down to Kalamazoo in this boat, and take the late night train for Detroit. Go to the Michigan Exchange Hotel, where I will meet you Monday evening!"
So the little neighborhood had had its "religious supply," but had also had its loss; for, as the weird moonlight of the next Sunday evening fell upon the quiet log farm-house, built strange forms among the moaning, almost leafless trees, and pictured upon the river's bosom a thousand ghostly figures, the scared form of a young woman stole away from her home, glided to the murmuring stream, sprang into the little boat, and was borne away to the hell of her future just as noiselessly but just as resistlessly as the river itself pushed onward to the great lakes, and was swept from thence to the ultimate, all-absorbing sea!
CHAPTER III.
Lilly in Detroit.—First and last Remorse.—The reverend Villain and his Victim enjoy the Hospitality of the Michigan Exchange Hotel.—A Scene.—"Bland, am I to go to your Mother's, as you promised?"—The Clergyman(?) "crazed."—Everything, save Respectability.—A Woman's Will—And a Man's Cajolement.
TO the imagination of the wayward country girl Detroit was a great city, and as she was whirled into the depot, where she saw the rushing river beyond, and was hustled hither and thither by the clamorous cabmen, a sense of giddiness came upon her, and for the first, and undoubtedly last time, she yearned for the quiet of the old log farm-house by the pleasant river.
Perhaps the old forms and faces called to her imploringly, pleading with her, as only the simple things of home, however plain and commonplace, can plead with the wandering one; and in a swift, agonized longing for the restfulness which the meanest virtue gives, but which had forever fled from her, the thought, if not the words:
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: It might have been"—
sped through her mind in a pitiful way; but just as she had almost resolved to return to her parents, ask their forgiveness, and disclose the character of the reverend villain, a man approached her, who, saying he was "from Bland," conducted her to a carriage in waiting and conveyed her to the Michigan Exchange Hotel, where she was fictitiously registered, and the clerk informed that her brother would call for her in the evening.
She had been assigned a very pretty room, elegantly furnished, and the windows gave her a view of the river and the shipping, with Windsor and the bluff hills of Canada beyond. It was all beautiful and wonderful to her—the hotel a palace, the river, with its great steamers, vessels, and ferries—a fairy scene; and Windsor, with the broken country beyond, all covered by the soft, blue, gossamer veil of early autumn—a beautiful dream!