‘Enough so!—it is plain enough so. True, We wretches cannot tell out all our wrong, Without offence to decent happy folk. I know that we must scrupulously hint With half-words, delicate reserves, the thing Which no one scrupled we should feel in full. Let pass the rest, then; only leave my oath Upon this sleeping child,—man’s violence, Not man’s seduction, made me what I am, As lost as ... I told _him_ I should be lost; When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves? That’s fatal!—And you call it being lost, That down came next day’s noon and caught me there Half gibbering and half raving on the floor, And wondering what had happened up in heaven, That suns should dare to shine when God himself Was certainly abolished. ‘I was mad,— How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks. I think they let me go, when I was mad, They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down I went by road and village, over tracts Of open foreign country, large and strange, Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-lines Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton Hand Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back, And resolute to get me, slow and sure; While every roadside Christ upon his cross Hung reddening through his gory wounds at me, And shook his nails in anger, and came down To follow a mile after, wading up The low vines and green wheat, crying ‘Take the girl! ‘She’s none of mine from henceforth,’ Then, I knew, (But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest) The charitable peasants gave me bread And leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied, At parting, Mary’s image round my neck— How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone; A woman has been strangled with less weight: I threw it in a ditch to keep it clean And ease my breath a little, when none looked; I did not need such safeguards:—brutal men Stopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seen My face,—I must have had an awful look. And so I lived: the weeks passed on,—I lived. ’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again, But, this time, in a dream, and hunted round By some prodigious Dream-fear at my back Which ended, yet: my brain cleared presently, And there I sate, one evening, by the road, I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone, Facing a sunset low upon the flats, As if it were the finish of all time,— The great red stone upon my sepulchre, Which angels were too weak to roll away. SEVENTH BOOK.