"I think if I had had a mother to tell me things it might have been different, but I had lived most of my life with my father, a proud, cold man who loved me, perhaps, but did not let me know it, though he robbed himself of the very necessaries of life that he might educate me. I was to be a teacher. That was his ambition and mine. There was no confidence between us. I could not get close to him as a child does to its mother.... I met this man when I was off at school. He was so different from the country boys I had known. He had a way of looking in my eyes and saying things that took my simple, silly heart by storm. I do not offer it in excuse, but madam--I loved him as I had never loved my God! I trusted him as though he _were_ my God. And when he told me that he loved me and wanted me to be his wife, I believed him. He could not marry me openly just now, he said, but if I would go with him to Washington we would be married secretly that very day. I was an honest girl, though a very foolish one, and I insisted on that.... I trusted him to my undoing. There was a form of marriage. A young man came to our room and murmured something as we stood before him. He did not look like a minister, but I was so dazed and frightened at what I had done that I hardly thought of it then.... Madam, we were never married. My husband, for so I believed him, told me so one day in a fit of anger--told me brutally." Margaret gripped the iron rail of the bed. "That day I took the last cent of money I had and went back to my father's house. It had been a bitter grief to him that I had brought his gray hairs to shame. He shut his door upon me. Oh, madam!... I begged my way then back to Washington and the man who had betrayed me, and begged him to take me in. What else could I do?... I lived with him in open sin until he came to me one day and told me that it was all over. He was to be married the next day. He had delayed telling me because he hated to have a scene, but he had decided now to settle down and live a correct life. "'And I!' I cried, standing up before him, 'what am I to do--I and your child--while you are leading a "correct" life?' He shrugged his shoulders. He would give me money. That was all he could do. Certainly it was as much as I could expect. He had not asked me to come back to him.