“You may guess how she took my breath away when she told me this. But I said, ‘Oh, my dear, you can’t mean to do anything so mad as go alone to meet Mr. Lesley, which is little better than a stranger to you?’ ‘A stranger!’ she cried out, ‘my darling Robert a stranger! Oh, if you only knew how noble he is, and how much he is going to give up to marry a poor girl like me!’ And then she went on about him as if he’d been something better than a human creature; and having always found him so much the gentleman myself, and so open-hearted and frank in all his ways, I could scarcely do otherwise than believe her. But still I urged her all I could against trusting him. ‘Don’t go, my dear,’ I said; ‘or, if you must go, let me go with you.’ But she blushed very red, and said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Burfield, the marriage is to be a secret, and I promised Robert again and again that I wouldn’t say a word about it to you or any living creature. Only you’ve been so good to me, and I couldn’t bear to go away without telling you the whole truth.’ And upon this I begged her still harder not to go away; I told her no good ever came out of secret marriages, and that there was generally something underhand and false at the bottom of them, that brought about all kinds of trouble and suffering afterwards. And I told her how my Burfield married me publicly in St. Pancras’ Church, and would have his two sisters--one in pink and one in blue--besides the Miss Parkinses, his first cousins, who were sweetly dressed in green and salmon, to walk after me to the altar. But it was no more use talking to Susan than if she’d been a stone statue, though she sat herself on the little hassock at my feet, and kept crying one minute and smiling the next, and talking about her darling Robert, and kissing me, till I almost thought her brain was turned. It was no use talking. ‘I love him so dearly,’ she said, ‘and I know how noble and generous he is.’ And that was her only argument; and long before daylight the next morning she went away by the early train; and though my heart seemed bleeding for her, I couldn’t kiss her when she said good-bye, and I couldn’t go to the station to see her off. ‘No, Susan,’ I said, ‘if you must go, you must, and I’ve no power to keep you back; but I’ll be neither act nor part in your going.’ But I stood at my window to see her go away, and I shall never forget the dark, drizzly morning, with streaks of gray like on one side of the sky, and white sickly-looking stars on the other, and Susan walking across the waste ground all alone, with the rain driving at her, and the wind beating at her, and a bit of a shabby carpet-bag in her hand. It seemed so dreadful to think she was going to be married like that.” “But she _did_ go away?” cried Francis. “She must have come back to you, then; for the letter with the Coltonslough post-mark reached her father less than eighteen months ago.”