For Woman's Love

by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

"For more than an hour she lay there before the fierce smarting and burning of her scourged flesh began to subside. The short November afternoon darkened into night. No one came near her. The hour for supper passed. No one called her to the meal. She heard the family passing to their rooms. She heard her mother putting the other children to bed—a duty that she herself had hitherto performed. At last all sounds died away in the house, and she knew that all the inmates had retired, and the lights were out. She was meditating to run away; she did not know in what direction, or to what end, farther than to escape from the home that was hateful to her.

"Evil spirits were with her, suggesting many desperate thoughts; at length they infused a deadly, horrible temptation to a deed of self-destruction so ghastly that its discovery should appal the family, the parish, and the whole world; that should cover her tormentors with shame, reproach and infamy.

"She sprang up from her bed and went to search in the drawer of a little old wooden stand, until she found a half page of note paper and a bit of lead pencil.

"She took them out and wrote to her persecutors, saying that she was going to throw herself—not into the sea, nor from a precipice, because both earth and sea give up their dead—but into the quicksands, which never give up anything; they, her tormentors, should never even see again the body they had bruised and torn and degraded; and she prayed that the Lord would ever deal by them as they had dealt with her.

"It must have been near midnight when she heard a tap at her window, so light that at first she thought it was made by a large raindrop; but presently her name was softly called by a voice that she recognized. Then she understood it all, and her thoughts of the quicksands vanished.

"Her room was a small one in the rear of the house, immediately over the back kitchen, and her back window opened upon the roof of the wood shed behind the kitchen. She went and hoisted the window, and there on the roof of the wood shed stood Alfred Whyte.

"He told her that he had taken leave of the ogre and the ogress hours before, and they thought he was off to London by the four o'clock mail; but that he had gone no farther than the railway station, where he had bought a ticket, and had gone on the platform, as if to wait for his train; but when it came up, instead of taking his place on it, he had slipped away in the confusion of its arrival and had hidden himself in the woods on the other side of the road, where he had waited until it was dark, when he had come back to watch the parsonage until every one should have gone to bed, so that he could get speech with Ann.

"And then he asked her if she were 'game for a bolt?"

"She did not understand him; but when he next spoke plainly, and inquired if she would run away with him and be married, she answered promptly that she would.

"He told her to get ready quickly, and to dress warmly, for the night was damp and cold, and to tie up a little bundle of things that she might need on the journey; but not to take much, because he had plenty of money, and could buy her all she needed.