"'I don't know. It seems to me I can feel the very faintest throb, but I cannot tell until we get her home. If she isn't dead, I am afraid she is worse,—frightened out of her senses, for ever.'
"Then father and William made preparations to carry her. I asked, timidly, if I could help. I think none of them had noticed before that I was there.
"'You!' my father said, with such concentrated scorn and wrath in his voice as I cannot describe; and then mother said, more mildly, but so sadly it was worse than any anger,—
"'No, I trusted her to you once. I supposed you loved her.'
"So I saw them move off, carrying her between them, and I followed after like an outcast, until it occurred to me that, at least, I could call a physician. So I flew by them like the wind, and off on the road to town. By some singular good fortune, if we ought not always to say Providence and never fortune, before I had gone forty rods I met Dr. Greene, who was coming in our direction to visit a patient. So I had him with me on the door-stone when they brought Nelly in.
"I did not dare to go into the room where they carried her; but I waited outside in an agony which punished me already for my sin. At last my mother had pity on me and looked out.
"'She is not dead, Jack,' she said, 'but she is still insensible, and until she is restored to consciousness there is no telling what the result will be.'
"Then an awful terror came over me, which I cannot put into words. What if she died, or what if she never had her reason again? Who in that house would ever bear to look at me? When Cain had murdered his brother he had to go forth alone,—what was left for me, another Cain, but to go also alone into the world?
"We lived nine miles away from a seaport town from which whaling vessels were continually starting, and it came into my mind that I might ship on board one for a three years' cruise; and, by the time it was over, the folks at home might have learned to forgive me for being in the world. So off through the night I hurried.