"No you won't!"
She walked away as fast as she was able, till she found a still place down by the water, where no one could see her. There she stood a moment irresolute, looked up through the storm as if searching for the sky, then sank upon her knees down in the silent shade of some timber.
Perhaps she was half-frightened at the act, for she knelt so a moment without speaking. There she began to mutter: "Maybe He won't drive me off; if they did, maybe he won't. I should just like to tell him, anyway!"
So she folded her hands, as she had folded them once at her mother's knee.
"O Lord! I'm tired of being Meg. I should like to be something else!"
Then she rose, crossed the bridge, and on past the thinning houses, walking feebly through the snow that drifted against her feet.
She did not know why she was there, or where she was going. She repeated softly to herself now and then the words uttered down in the shade of the timber, her brain dulled by the cold, faint, floating dreams stealing into them.
Meg! tired of being Meg! She wasn't always that. It was another name, a pretty name she thought, with a childish smile,—Maggie. They always call her that. She used to play about among the clover-blossoms and buttercups then; the pure little children used to kiss her; nobody hooted after her in the street, or drove her out of church, or left her all alone out in the snow,—Maggie!
Perhaps, too, some vague thought came to her of the mournful, unconscious prophecy of the name, as the touch of the sacred water upon her baby-brow had sealed it,—Magdalene.
She stopped a moment, weakened by her toiling against the wind, threw off her hood, the better to catch her laboring breath, and standing so, looked back at the city, its lights glimmering white and pale, through the falling snow.