oined our traveling company, and that
accounted for her yellow and puffy appearance. E. was now away
up-country with a circus, but was expected down any time. A. told
me a good deal of all this, between her tears, while sitting at
my feet, and her tone carried conviction. When I ought to have
gone home I persuaded her to let me stay all night. We had been
in bed some time when her mother knocked at the door and wanted
to come in for something in a chest of drawers there. "Why don't
you open the door, A.? Who have you got there? Hasn't that fellow
gone?" A. was confused and told me to get under the bed, but I
refused, and she covered me up with the bed clothes as well as
she could and opened the door. She had hid my clothes, but missed
one of my shoes, and her mother saw it. "Oh, A.," was all she
said; "you've got that fellow in bed," and went out crying.
"Well, Fred" (my stage name), "you've got me into a nice row," A.
said. She gave me my breakfast in the morning and I walked out of
the front door without being molested. Another night I entered
her window by a ladder and stayed all night. In the middle of the
night E. came home drunk. She would not let him in and told him
she would have nothing more to do with him. He attempted to break
in the door, when A. called to me, and hearing a man in the room
he went away, saying, as he went downstairs: "Oh, A.! Oh, A.!"
as if he thought she would not have done such a thing. He never
molested us after that night.

I think it was my intention, at first, to break off with A.
gradually. I found, however, I could not keep away from her, and
it commenced to be evident to me that a bachelor's life in
lodgings again would be dreary and lonely. And all this time the
fear that I had offended God troubled me more than I have said,
and it occurred to me (there may have been a touch of sophistry
in this, or not) that if I were a true husband to her for the
future--stuck to her and worked for her for the rest of my
days--perhaps it would find favor in God's sight and be an
atonement for my sin. Had she been free I would have married her,
I believe. But she began to be harassed by her mother and
bothered about my incessantly coming there and staying all night.
It ended in my telling her I would be a husband to her, and she
came and lived with me