“Not in town, don’t know when he will return,” she was chanting to herself, as she came through the open door. She started back, as if surprised to find her new champion still there. Without speaking, she dropped down on the bed, facing him, fanning her flushed cheeks with the envelope, although the little room was quite cold.
“I am sorry that your letter was undelivered,” said Abram Antoine, after a considerable silence. There was another pause, and then the girl, still clutching the fated letter, revealed her story of embarrassment.
“It isn’t a long story,” she began. "My name is Ernestine de Kneuse. My father is the well-known miller and land-owner at New Berlinville, in Berks County–Solomon de Kneuse. About a year ago a young stranger, Carl Nitschman, I think a High German, came to the town, stopping at the ‘Three Friends’ Inn, which it was rumored he was to purchase. While negotiating, he naturally met many of the leading people. He was handsome and engaging, and all the girls went wild over him. It gave me a fiendish pleasure to think that he favored me above the rest, and one afternoon I cut my classes at the Select Academy, where I was in my third year, and went walking with him.
"My father, who belonged to the old school, had a hatred for any one who might even consider going into the liquor business, saw us together and told mother. On reaching home, although I was eighteen and had not had even a spanking for several years, and thought I had outgrown it, my mother took me to my room and administered a good, sound ‘scotching’ with the rod.
"Previously they had forbidden the young man the house, and when I informed him how I was treated, he told me if I was disciplined again, to run away.
"Not long afterwards I was kept in at school, and mother accused me of meeting my lover. I told her to go to the school and find out for herself, which she did, but nevertheless that evening my mother visited me in my room with the strap, and walloped me until I was black and blue from shoulders to ankles.
"Meanwhile Carl’s negotiations for the purchase of the tavern had fallen through, and he was preparing to leave for Reading. Through one of my girl friends who was not so strictly raised, I communicated to him the story of this latest indignity, begging him to take me with him. He replied that he would be traveling about for some time before settling down there, but as soon as he was located, he would send me his address, and to come.
"I recall the morning of his departure, how I crawled out of bed before dawn, and pressed my tear-stained face against the window lights as he climbed on the coach at the inn, which was across the street from where we lived, and settling down among his goodly store of bags and boxes, was driven away.
"Weeks passed, and I eventually got a letter through one of my girl friends whose parents were less strict, that he had gone to Harrisburg, and I should join him there. By exercising a great amount of ingenuity, I got out of the house, and on the night stage for Reading, during one of the terrible Equinoctial rains, making close connections with another stage for Harrisburg, and I came to my present abode a month before, but have never once seen Nitschman in the interval.
“I’ve now learned that my parents are on my track, and will reach town tonight; I have spent my last cent, and my letters to Nitschman receive no satisfactory answers. I am now penniless, and cannot pay my lodging, have eaten nothing all day, and have no place to go. I would not return for all the world and subject myself to an irate mother.”