f the great beam that ran along to support it, when he caught her by
her garments. So poor and thin were those garments, that if she had
not been poor and thin too, she would have dropped from them into
the darkness below. He took her in his arms, lifted her down upon the
bridge, and stood as if protecting her from a pursuing death. I had
managed to find an easier mode of descent, and now stood a little way
from them.

'Poor girl! poor girl!' he said, as if to himself: 'was this the only
way left?'

Then he spoke tenderly to her. What he said I could not hear--I only
heard the tone.

'O sir!' she cried, in piteous entreaty, 'do let me go. Why should a
wretched creature like me be forced to live? It's no good to you, sir.
Do let me go.'

'Come here,' he said, drawing her close to the fence. 'Stand up again on
the beam. Look down.'

She obeyed, in a mechanical kind of way. But as he talked, and she kept
looking down on the dark mystery beneath, flowing past with every now
and then a dull vengeful glitter--continuous, forceful, slow, he felt
her shudder in his still clasping arm.

'Look,' he said, 'how it crawls along--black and slimy! how silent and
yet how fierce! Is that a nice place to go to down there? Would there
be any rest there, do you think, tumbled about among filth and creeping
things, and slugs that feed on the dead; among drowned women like
yourself drifting by, and murdered men, and strangled babies? Is that
the door by which you would like to go out of the world?'

'It's no worse,' she faltered, '--not so bad as what I should leave
behind.'

'If this were the only way out of it, I would not keep you from it. I
would say, "Poor thing! there is no help: she must go." But there is
another way.'

'There is no other way, sir--if you knew all,' she said.

'Tell me, then.'

'I cannot. I dare not. Please--I would rather go.'

She looked, from the mere glimpses I could get of her, somewhere about
five-and-twenty, making due allowance for the wear of suffering so
evident even in those glimpses. I think she might have been beautiful if
the waste of her history could have been restored. That she had had at
least some advantages of education, was evident from both her tone and
her speech. But oh, the wild eyes, and the tortured lips, drawn back
from the teeth with an agony of hopelessness, as she struggled anew,
perhaps mistrusting them, to escape from the great arms that held her!

'But the river cann