"Yes, I say him hugging her on the bridge, myself," said the old countryman who had passed them, and a smile went around, and then a cheer for the fair young life saved for a happy wedded future.
They carried her to the hotel that was but a few yards away, and it was found that she had sustained some bruises on her side, that was all. She would be able to go on with the company.
And a great revulsion of feeling took place in her mind—joy that her life was spared, horror at the momentary insanity that had driven her to that awful deed. Life grew sweet again, in spite of her great sorrow.
When the sympathetic women left her alone that evening in her room, she knelt down in a passion of repentance, and prayed God to forgive her for her great sin in trying to throw away the life He had given.
And she prayed Heaven to help her to forget Harry Hawthorne, and to love Clifford Standish, the man she had promised to marry.
"Surely he is good and true, and deserves my love," she thought, in an impulse of gratitude to him for the way he had shielded her when the people talked of suicide. She was ashamed of the truth now—glad for them to think it had been an accident.
"I will never be so foolish and so wicked again," she thought, in her keen remorse for her sin.
She spent a wakeful, restless night in spite of the sedatives the kind Doctor Spicer had administered before he went away. The hotel was so close to the railroad that she could hear the trains thundering by all night long, and the sound made her shudder with terror at thought of the heavy iron wheels that had come so near to crushing out her fair young life.
She was glad when morning came, and they boarded the train for New York.
She was eager to get away from this place, yet she would never forget Alderson, with its beautiful mountains, its romantic, winding river, and the bridge where she had stood with Standish, listening to the cruel words that had extinguished the last spark of hope in her breast and driven her mad with despair.