Jabez, bottles in hand, his mind a chaos, had walked in at the wash-kitchen door precisely as Augusta, stealthily creeping through a gap in the privet-hedge, made her way to the convenient staircase-window, shivering more from fright than from the chill drizzling rain which had begun to fall. Putting her head in at the parlour-door where Ellen was sewing, with a brief “I’m off to bed,” she hurried upstairs in the dusk to lave her flushed face, smooth her disordered hair, crush it under a night-cap, and place her head on a pillow, to still her heart’s flutterings under the screening counterpane, and hide her emotions from her cousin under the semblance of sleep, though sleep was an absolute impossibility. In 1821 the village of Gretna Green, on the Scottish border, was the general resort of runaway lovers, who, being in their minority, could not be married legally in England without parental consent, whereas in Caledonia a mere promise to marry made in the presence of witnesses was held binding. At Gretna a man not in holy orders, but metaphorically called “the blacksmith,” because he riveted the chains of matrimony, lived in the first house beyond the bridge which spanned the river Sark, and, with a ceremonial as unseemly as it was brief, married all comers, often with pursuers at his very doors; and the marriages so contracted were not to be set aside. For more than half a century Gretna Green weddings had figured largely in the literature of the stage and of the circulating library; and there is no doubt that the halo of romance thrown around an elopement to Gretna blinded to the impropriety of the prenuptial flight many a foolish or headstrong girl whom the actual ceremony shocked and startled. Augusta Ashton, with all her sentimental romance, all her petulant wilfulness, all her resentment at being exiled from home and her Adonis, yet loved her parents well, although her reverence and filial obedience had been gradually undermined by the plausible sophistry and impassioned eloquence of her ardent lover. But if she loved them much, she, unfortunately, loved Laurence more. He was, to do him justice, terribly in earnest; and in the inexperience of her seventeen years she could not be expected to sift and analyse that passionate earnestness for its many components. With her _all_ was _love_, and _love_ was _all_. His proposition had, nevertheless, come upon her with a shock. She was not prepared to ignore the prudent teaching of her mother, or to brave the indignation of her indulgent father, or to forfeit her own self-respect, and nothing could have moved her to consent but that appalling threat of suicide, and he knew her tender heart well when he made it.