Her face was a piteous sight just then. Do you think the haughtiest of the pure, fair women in yonder treasured homes could have loathed her as she loathed herself at that moment?
Yet it might have been a face as fair and pure as theirs; kisses of mother and husband might have warmed those drawn and hueless lips; they might have prayed their happy prayers, every night and morning, to God. It might have been. You would almost have thought he had meant it should be so, if you had looked into her eyes sometimes,—perhaps when she was on her knees by the timber; or when she listened to the chant, crouching out of sight in the church.
Well, it was only that it might have been. Life could hold no possible blessed change for her, you know. Society had no place for it, though she sought it carefully with tears. Who of all God's happy children that he had kept from sin would have gone to her and said, "My sister, his love holds room for you and me"; have touched her with her woman's hand, held out to her her woman's help, and blessed her with her woman's prayers and tears?
Do you not think Meg knew the answer? Had she not learned it well, in seven wandering years? Had she not read it in every blast of this bitter night, out into which she had come to find a helper, when all the happy world passed by her, on the other side?
She stood there, looking at the glittering of the city, then off into the gloom where the path lay through the snow. Some struggle was in her face.
"Home! home and mother! She don't want me,—nobody wants me. I'd better go back."
The storm was beating upon her. But, looking from the city to the drifted path, and back from the lonely path to the lighted city, she did not stir.
"I should like to see it, just to look in the window, a little,—it wouldn't hurt 'em any. Nobody'd know."
She turned, walking slowly where the snow lay pure and untrodden. On, out of sight of the town, where the fields were still; thinking only as she went, that nobody would know,—nobody would know.
She would see the old home out in the dark; she could even say good-by to it quite aloud, and they wouldn't hear her, or come and drive her away. And then—