This narrative occupied a longer time in the relation than in the shape to which I have reduced it, for it was frequently interrupted by questions and exclamations, which I have not thought it necessary to insert here. When she concluded, the day was already waning, and the long shadows from the woods were stretching down the stream, and the setting sun was, here and there, blazing through the trees, like focal rays caught on the surface of a burning-glass. The haze of evening was gathering round us, and settling over the little bridge which was now slowly fading into the distance. Astræa had confided her whole life to me with the utmost candor. The strong emotions she exhibited throughout afforded the best proof, if any were wanted, of her perfect sincerity. There was nothing kept back--no _arrière-pensée_--no false coloring; her real character came out forcibly in this painful confession. Few women would have had the requisite fortitude to submit to such an ordeal, and take their final stand upon a position which marked them out as Pariahs in the eyes of the world. I felt how great the misery must have been from which she sought this terrible escape; and how much greater was the strength of will that sustained her in the resolution to embrace it. Her wild sense of natural justice had risen in resistance against laws which it appeared to her more criminal to obey than to violate. It was not a paroxysm of the passions--it was not the sophistry that seeks for its own convenience to arraign the dispensations of society; it was a strong mind, contending in its own right against obligations founded on force, and violence, and wrong--asserting its claim to liberate itself from trammels to which it had never given a voluntary assent--recoiling from a life of skepticism and hypocrisy, and the frightful conflicts it entails between duty and the instincts of reason and the heart--and prepared, since no other alternative was left, to suffer in itself alone, and in the consequences of its own act, all obloquy, all vengeance the world could inflict. That there lay beneath this a grave error, undermining the foundations upon which the whole social superstructure rested, was, in a certain large and general sense, sufficiently obvious to me. But who could argue such questions against convictions based upon individual and exceptional injuries? Who could require, in the very moment and agony of sacrifice, that she who had been thus wronged and tortured, and who had never, of her own free action, incurred the responsibility from which she revolted, should offer herself up a victim to laws that afforded her no protection, and condemned her to eternal strife, and the sins of a rebellious conscience? I would have saved her if I could. It was my first impulse--my most earnest desire. But of what avail was the attempt? Where was she to find refuge? Only one of two courses lay before her--to return and fulfil her contract, or to renounce the world: the first was