Then, taking advantage of a particularly noisy scuffle, Elizabeth slipped softly by the door. The terrors of nightmare were upon her. She imagined she heard them pursuing her but could not run for fear of falling in the darkness; pitching down some hidden trap or making some accidental sound that would tell them of her presence.
At last, after almost innumerable windings, a glimmer of electric light came down upon her through a cellar grating which opened directly upon the street. A little further on and another flight of worm eaten steps were before her. Up these she climbed, and raised, with all her strength a heavy grating, then, feeling once more the pure air upon her brow and the sense of freedom in her soul, she reeled and fell heavily forward, like an inanimate body, upon the damp, gray curb stone. How long she lay there she could not tell, but the bell of a distant cathedral, tolling the hour of midnight, aroused her, and she crawled along until her strength in a measure returned, then, rising, she walked as quickly as possible away from this terrible neighborhood. On and on she went, her strength failing her at every step, until once more exhausted she sank down before the gateway of a large building, which, fortunately for her, proved to be a Hospital.
Here she was found by a resident physician on his return from the Opera in the early morning hours.
Some time during the following day an employee of the Hospital discovered a soiled and water-stained Marriage Certificate, which the wind had evidently blown behind the massive gates. The Certificate was placed in the physician's private desk for safe keeping, but no connection between it and the suffering woman was ever suspected.
Elizabeth was placed immediately in the ward, and every care given her, but for four weeks she hovered between life and death, raving of murder, robbery, suicide and all such frightful happenings, until the anxious physician feared for her reason as well as for her life. It was not until her child was born, a month after her entrance, that she gained, either mentally or physically, but after another four weeks of excellent nursing she was discharged from the Hospital as needing no further treatment.
She had given the authorities a false name in an almost involuntary effort toward self-protection and the concealment of her degradation, receiving at their hands that disinterested and strictly impartial attention bestowed upon all their patients. She was to them but one of thousands who drift on the shoals of sin and are left to perish, or are floated off by the tide of life to a longer struggle and a fiercer death on the ragged rocks of crime, therefore it was only natural that her case elicited no special comment from the busy officials. Thus, sick at heart, homeless, friendless, with no money, and with her shame-born child resting heavily upon her arm, Elizabeth went forth once more into the streets of London.
CHAPTER V. MAURICE SINCLAIR.
The storm that tears the human heart