Poor child! If they had guessed what was aching at her heart they must have pitied her. Not a word or line had she received from Norman Wylde since the day he had sailed away from Richmond, after the one week of delirious happiness in which she had been his adored wife.
Faithfully had she kept the secret of her marriage, but the time was coming when it must be declared, or she would have to bear the burden of a bitter shame. Unless Norman Wylde returned soon, she would be the mother of a child on whom the world would frown in scorn, while she, poor girl, would never be able to lift up her head again.
Oh, how she repented her disobedience to her mother! If she had listened to her she would not have come to this terrible pass. Perhaps Norman was false to her, perhaps that marriage in Washington had been a fraudulent one. She had read of such things.
“Heaven pity me, how shall I ever confess the truth to my mother?” she sobbed nightly, as she lay wide awake in her little room, too wretched and frightened to sleep, wondering why her husband did not write to her, and praying always that Heaven would remove her very soon from a world that she had found so dark and cruel.
A dark, terrible day came to her at last—dark, although the sun was shining in the sky, the green grass springing, and the gay birds chirping in the budding trees, for it was May now, and the world was made new again—she was discharged from the factory.
No reason was given, none asked. She understood.
For many days she had seen that her companions at work shunned and sneered at her. She had had many friends among them once, but now not one. She did not blame them. In their place she would perhaps have acted the same. There is a wide, wide gulf between womanly purity and fallen virtue, and they believed that she was a lost and ruined creature.
As she went slowly, wearily homeward she felt that she could not bear to tell her mother of her discharge, for then she would have to confess all the rest.
“I could more easily die than confess to her, for, oh, she will be so angry, so angry!” she shuddered weakly, and a desperate resolve came to her.
She would run away and hide herself from all who had ever known her.