She hurried down the road, never once looking back. The leafless trees were surging in the night-wind; their gaunt branches were waving grimly over her head. The hedges took fantastic shapes before her, and beside her. Her limbs trembled and her teeth chattered, yet she hastened on. Her head ached. She felt suffocated. The world was so cruel to her. If only she could fly from it and forget—only forget!
The day was dawning; the deep blue of the sky to the left of her was streaked with thin bars. All before her was a blank void of dun gray. A veil of vapor beat against her cheeks. The wide marshy lands lay in mist around her. Not a sound but her own footstep on the road. Not a bird in the empty air, not a cloud in the blank sky. It was a dreary scene; neither day nor night.
And through this grim realm that is aloof from all that is human, one poor, broken-hearted girl hurried on, her little bundle in her hand, a shawl wrapped about her shoulders, her red, tearless eyes fixed in front of her.
Like the spirit of unrest, the wind moaned and soughed. Now and then a withered leaf of last year went by her with a light rustle and stealthy motion. Desolate as the heart within her was the waste ground.
Bit by bit the gray sky lightened; the east was fretted over with pink, and a freshness was breathed into the air. Then she began to run. Behind her were all her pretty dreams, and they were dead. Behind her was the love she had cherished, and that was dead, too. From a joyful vision she had awakened to find the idol cold at her breast.
Running hard along the gloomy road, under the empty sky, through the surging wind, the outcast girl cried in her tearless grief as a little child cries for the mother who is in her grave—never knowing its loss until it has grown tired, and weary, and sick, and the night is very near.
She came to a brick-kiln that stood back from the road. Its wreathing smoke coiled slowly upward in the smoke-like atmosphere. The red haze drew her to it, as it drew the shivering waifs of the air. Cold and tired, she crept up and stood some minutes in the glow; but a step fell on her ear from behind the kiln, and she stole away like a guilty thing.
Away, away, she knew not where. On, on, she knew not why.
The day had dawned now. In the brightness of morning her heart sunk lower. Draggled and soiled, her hair still damp with the dew, and the odor of night in her dress, she walked on in the golden radiance of the risen sun.
Oh, to bury herself forever, and yet not to die—no, no, not to die!