nder the trees stood Harthouse, his horse tied near by, and talking
with him was Louisa.

Mrs. Sparsit stood behind a tree, like Robinson Crusoe in his ambuscade
against the savages, and listened with all her ears. She could not hear
all, but caught enough to know that he was telling her he loved her, and
begging her to leave her husband, her home and friends, and to run away
with him.

In her delight and in the noise of rain upon the foliage (for a
thunder-storm was rolling up) Mrs. Sparsit did not catch Louisa's
answer. Where and when Harthouse asked her to join him, she could not
hear, but as he mounted and rode away she thought he said "To-night."

She waited in the rain, rejoicing, till her patience was at length
rewarded by seeing Louisa, cloaked and veiled as if for a journey, come
from the house and go toward the railroad station. Then Mrs. Sparsit,
drawing her draggled shawl over her head to hide her face, followed,
boarded the same train, and hastened to tell the news of his wife's
elopement to Bounderby in London.

Wet to the skin, her feet squashing in her shoes, her clothes spoiled
and her bonnet looking like an over-ripe fig, with a terrible cold that
made her voice only a whisper, and sneezing herself almost to pieces,
Mrs. Sparsit found Bounderby at his city hotel, exploded with the
combustible information she carried and fainted quite away on his coat
collar.

Furious at the news she brought, Bounderby hustled her into a fast
train, and together, he raging and glaring and she inwardly jubilant,
they hurried toward Coketown to inform Mr. Gradgrind, who was then at
home, of his daughter's doings.

But where, meanwhile, was Louisa? Not run away with Harthouse, as Mrs.
Sparsit so fondly imagined, but safe in her own father's house in
Coketown.

She had suffered much without complaint, but Harthouse's proposal had
been the last straw. Added to all the insults she had suffered at her
husband's hands, and her fearful suspicion of Tom's guilt, it had proven
too much for her to bear. She had pretended to agree to Harthouse's plan
only that she might the more quickly rid herself of his presence.

Mr. Gradgrind, astonished at her sudden arrival at Stone Lodge, was
shocked no less at her ghastly appearance than by what she said. She
told him she cursed the hour when she had been born to grow up a victim
to his teachings; that her whole life had been empty; that every hope,
affection and fancy had been cru