Dawn of the Morning

by Grace Livingston Hill

On the big white bed lay her bonnet and mantle. It was the work of but a moment to put them on, though her fingers trembled so that she could scarcely tie the ribbons under her chin.

Charles had unfastened her trunk before he went down to supper, and set it open for her. There on the top, where she had slipped it in after her step-mother had shut the trunk and gone downstairs, lay the sombre gray frock she had worn at Friend Ruth's school. She had put it in with sudden impulse, as being the only thing she had left of her girlhood. Mrs. Van Rensselaer had seen to it that her step-daughter's outfit was perfect, as befitted the daughter of her father. No Winthrop should criticise her for lack of elaborate and costly outfit. But the gray dress which had been cast aside was the one Dawn had worn afternoons at the school, and it reminded her of pleasant days among the girls, with care-free thoughts—a little gray girlhood, which had nevertheless become bright in comparison to the new life. She snatched the gray frock, and in it wrapped a few light articles she felt she might need, taking only necessities, and of those but few. These she rolled tightly in the frock, pinned the bundle firmly, saw that it could be hidden under her mantle, caught up her hand-bag which contained a purse with twenty-five dollars which her father had put into her hands when she left home, and was ready.

She had not stopped to think how she was going to get out of the house without being seen. A glance out of the front window showed a balcony with a wrought-iron railing, which hung inside the white pillared front piazza, but Charles and his father sat just below, talking in low, pleasant voices. She could not get out that way. Equally impossible, of course, would be the front door, even if she could get through the hall without Betty's seeing her.

With one long look down at Charles, she put out a protesting hand toward him, as if bidding him farewell. It wrung her heart to look at him. She turned quickly away, paused an instant in the middle of the room, and swept it with her eyes, then, with a little tragic wave of renunciation, she went swiftly into the room beyond. The open desk caught her attention. She stopped and, taking up a pen, wrote on a sheet of paper:

Goodby. I had to go.—DAWN.

She wrote hurriedly, feeling that she had but a brief respite for her flight. Then, casting down the pen, she went to one of the windows in the room and looked out. There was another balcony here, and she stepped out. It was dark, but the candle-light from the dining-room showed a terrace below. It did not look to be a great distance.

For an ordinary runaway bride, this balcony would have been impossible as a mode of egress; but Dawn and her schoolmates had practised all sorts of gymnastics from the windows and roof of the old barn, and even on the gables of the house itself. She knew how to drop like a cat from a considerable distance. She could swing from the great high limb of the old cherry tree that overlooked the Hudson, longer than any of the other girls, and then drop gracefully in their midst, without ruffling her composure in the least.

But to perform such a feat attired in her first long dress of rustling silk, with a bonnet tied under her chin, and a bundle and hand-bag to look after—to say nothing of doing it in an unknown and almost entirely dark place—was another thing.

Dawn glanced back into the room, but could think of no other way. It wouldn't be pleasant to fall and break her leg at the outset, but she fancied she heard steps coming up the stairs, and to hesitate might bring discovery.

She leaned quickly over the railing of the balcony and dropped her bundle down to the terrace. It fell with a hushed thud among the tall grass, and did not sound as if the distance were great.