And yet, even as she walked away from him, the sickness of indecision was upon her. Like all narrow experiences, her narrow experience made her afraid of everything beyond its own limits. Her habit of life was the habit of the weakened bird of prey that attacks only the defenseless and flies before the strong. She had become a moral coward, and the progress of her physical disease directly accentuated the insidious encroachments of her moral illness. She could not openly face Marian; she did not dare openly to defy Dyker. She wanted only to run away.
By four o'clock the next afternoon she had run away. The night had been a wearisome journey backward and forward between the decision to obey the magistrate and the decision to evade him. She thought that she owed him much, but she knew that she could not successfully face Marian and lie. She was tremblingly afraid of Wesley's vengeance, but she was more afraid of Marian's honest eyes. All day she lay upon her bed, dizzy from this circling process of thought, but at last, in an attack of dread of the lie more severe than any that had preceded it, she flung her clothes into a little trunk, which she had recently purchased, and, calling a cab, drove to a new lodging-house.
She did not go out that evening, but the next she had to go, and she had not been on Broadway for two hours before a plain-clothes man touched her arm.
"I'm sorry, kid," he said, "but you've got to come along with me."
Instinctively she recoiled, but the detective's fingers had slipped to her wrist and tightened on it. The sword had fallen.
"Where to?" she asked.
She knew the man. She had given him money, and more than money, yet she expected no mercy, expected nothing but an explanation.
"Jefferson Market," said her captor. "But if you've got anybody handy who'll go your bail, I'll take you to see him first, before we go down to Ninth Street."
Mary shook her head. Helpless horror had her for its own.
"No use," she answered.