‘What has he done?’
She looked fearfully around, and said, sobbing: ‘In trying to make me confess to what I have never done, he adopts plans I dare not describe for terrifying me into a weak state, so that I may own to anything! I resolved to write to you, as I had no other friend.’ She added, with dreary irony, ‘I thought I would give him some ground for his suspicion, so as not to disgrace his judgment.’
‘Do you really mean, Emmeline,’ he tremblingly inquired, ‘that you—that you want to fly with me?’
‘Can you think that I would act otherwise than in earnest at such a time as this?’
He was silent for a minute or more. ‘You must not go with me,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘It would be sin.’
‘It cannot be sin, for I have never wanted to commit sin in my life; and it isn’t likely I would begin now, when I pray every day to die and be sent to Heaven out of my misery!’
‘But it is wrong, Emmeline, all the same.’
‘Is it wrong to run away from the fire that scorches you?’