She had met Thompson—she did not say where—and believing he was an honest man, as he represented himself to be, able to keep her in a comfortable position, as he also represented, she began to receive his advances favourably.
He told her the old story about his being a gentleman of independent means, with a liking to travel about. She listened, and was deceived. Not so her mother and father. Both of them took an instinctive dislike to the plausible villain who came after their daughter.
She did, as many other daughters do, and will do to the end of the chapter—she believed the stranger, and left her home with him.
She insisted that she was properly married to him at church—which, if true, would add bigamy to Peace’s other offences against the law—but never gave any indication where the ceremony took place.
“I never quite liked the man,” she said, “even though I disobeyed my parents to follow him; and on my way to church to get married a strong feeling took hold of me to turn back. How I wish now I had done it!”
Then she would burst afresh into tears, and exclaim—
“But it serves me right. It is but a just punishment upon me for disobeying my parents. They did not want me to have anything to do with the man, and I ought never to have spoken to him. It was a sorry day for me I ever saw him.”
She went on to say that she had relatives in a good position in the North. “I wonder,” she cried, “if my brother would take me in.”
Her brother, she told Mrs. Long, was a medical man, and her sisters, of whom she had several, were well married.
She asked Mrs. Long if she would advise her to write to them. Mrs. Long thought that would be the best thing she could do, and here came a strange bit of feminine jealousy, which showed of what a contradictory compound some womenkind are made.