e
able to stay a little longer; but she prevailed on him to let her go.
He brought her to the nearest point not within sight of any of the
windows, and, there leaving her, set out at a rapid pace for the inn
where he had put up his mare.

When Tom was gone, and the bare night, a diffused conscience, all about
her, Letty, with a strange fear at her heart, like one in a churchyard,
with the ghost-hour at hand, and feeling like "a guilty thing
surprised," although she had done nothing wrong in its mere self, stole
back to the door of the kitchen, longing for the shelter of her own
room, as never exile for his fatherland.

She had left the door an inch ajar, that she might run the less risk of
making a noise in opening it; but ere she reached it, the moon shining
full upon it, she saw plainly, and her heart turned sick when she saw,
that it was closed. Between cold and terror she shuddered from head to
foot, and stood staring.

Recovering a little, she said to herself some draught must have blown
it to. If so, there was much danger that the noise had been heard; but,
in any case, there was no time to lose. She glided swiftly to it. She
lifted the latch softly--but, horror of horrors! in vain. The door was
locked. She was shut out. She must lie or confess! And what lie would
serve? Poor Letty! And yet, for all her dismay, her terror, her despair
that night, in her innocence, she never once thought of the worst
danger in which she stood!

The least perilous, where no safe way was left, would now have been to
let the simple truth appear; Letty ought immediately to have knocked at
the door, and, should that have proved unavailing, to have broken her
aunt's window even, to gain hearing and admittance. But that was just
the kind of action of which, truthful as was her nature, poor Letty,
both by constitution and training, was incapable; human opposition,
superior anger, condemnation, she dared not encounter. She sank, more
than half fainting, upon the door-step.

The moment she came to herself, apprehension changed into active dread,
rushed into uncontrollable terror. She sprang to her feet, and, the
worst thing she could do, fled like the wind after Tom--now, indeed,
she imagined, her only refuge! She knew where he had put up his horse,
and knew he could hardly take any other way than the foot-path to
Testbridge. He could not be more than a few yards ahead of her, she
thought. Presently she heard him whistling, she was sur