For Woman's LoveSouthworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte
General
For Woman's Love
Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte
Fiction
"He told her to get ready quickly, and to dress warmly, for the night
was damp and cold, and to tie up a little bundle of things that she
might need on the journey; but not to take much, because he had plenty
of money, and could buy her all she needed.
"'Much;' Poor little thing, she had not much to take! She put on her
best dress--a well-worn blue serge--a coarse, black cloth walking
jacket, and a little straw hat with a faded blue ribbon. She had no
gloves. She tied up a hair brush, worn nearly to the wood, a tooth brush
not much better, the half of a broken dressing comb, and one clean linen
collar, in a small pocket handkerchief, and she was all ready for her
wedding trip.
"He told her to bolt her door before she came out, because that would
take the ogres some little while to force it open, and would give the
fugitives a better start.
"Ann did everything her boy lover directed, and finally stepped out of
the window on to the roof below, and joined him. He let down the window,
and closed the shutters with a spring that securely fastened them.
"That, he told her, would certainly give them a longer start, for it
would take an hour at least to force the room open and discover her
flight.
"Then they left the parsonage together.
"She had forgotten all about the parting note of malediction which she
had left behind her on the stand, as she stepped along the lane leading
to the highway.
"He asked her to take his arm, and when they reached the public road, he
inquired if she were game for a ten mile walk.
"She told him that she could walk to the end of the world with him,
because she was so happy to be beside the only one on earth who had ever
been kind to her--since her father's death.
"Then he explained the steps that he had taken, and must still take, to
elude pursuit; how that he had gone to the railway station and bought a
first class ticket for the four o'clock express to London, and
afterward, when the train came up, he had mingled with the crowd getting
off and getting on, and so eluded observation, and had slipped away and
hidden himself in the thicket until dark, so as to make every one
concerned believe that he had gone off by the mail train alone to
London.
"Now he told her that they must trudge straight on ten miles north, to
take the train to Glasgow; so that while people were hunting for them in
the south, they would be safe in the north.
"As they walked on he told her that he wanted to get away from England
and see the world--the new world across the ocean. He had seen Europe
summer after summer, traveling with his father and mother on the
Continent. Now he wanted to see America; and asked her if she did not
also.
"She told him that she wanted to see every place that he wanted to see,
and to go everywhere he wanted to go, for that he was the only friend
she had in all the wide world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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