he fiery torture of her flesh and the humiliation of her spirit she
uttered but these piteous words:

"'Oh, my own mother!--oh, my lost father! do you see your child?'

"For more than an hour she lay there before the fierce smarting and
burning of her scourged flesh began to subside. The short November
afternoon darkened into night. No one came near her. The hour for supper
passed. No one called her to the meal. She heard the family passing to
their rooms. She heard her mother putting the other children to bed--a
duty that she herself had hitherto performed. At last all sounds died
away in the house, and she knew that all the inmates had retired, and
the lights were out. She was meditating to run away; she did not know in
what direction, or to what end, farther than to escape from the home
that was hateful to her.

"Evil spirits were with her, suggesting many desperate thoughts; at
length they infused a deadly, horrible temptation to a deed of
self-destruction so ghastly that its discovery should appal the family,
the parish, and the whole world; that should cover her tormentors with
shame, reproach and infamy.

"She sprang up from her bed and went to search in the drawer of a little
old wooden stand, until she found a half page of note paper and a bit of
lead pencil.

"She took them out and wrote to her persecutors, saying that she was
going to throw herself--not into the sea, nor from a precipice, because
both earth and sea give up their dead--but into the quicksands, which
never give up anything; they, her tormentors, should never even see
again the body they had bruised and torn and degraded; and she prayed
that the Lord would ever deal by them as they had dealt with her.

"It must have been near midnight when she heard a tap at her window, so
light that at first she thought it was made by a large raindrop; but
presently her name was softly called by a voice that she recognized.
Then she understood it all, and her thoughts of the quicksands vanished.

"Her room was a small one in the rear of the house, immediately over the
back kitchen, and her back window opened upon the roof of the wood shed
behind the kitchen. She went and hoisted the window, and there on the
roof of the wood shed stood Alfred Whyte.

"He told her that he had taken leave of the ogre and the ogress hours
before, and they thought he was off to London by the four o'clock mail;
but that he had gone no farther than the railway station, where h