“Matters reached such a pitch at last that it became plain that I must either consent to marry the man I loathed or leave my home for good.  Goaded on by my apparent encouragement of Archie Jolliffe, my stepmother resolved to bring matters to a crisis.  She started a terrific row with me one day, my father was brought into it, and I stood up against them both.  The upshot was that when the interview was over I went out of the house boiling with indignation and for the time utterly reckless.  Chance caught the psychological moment and threw me in the way of Archie Jolliffe.  He saw something was wrong and pressed me to tell him what had happened.  He was so chivalrous and sympathetic that I was led in my turbulent state of mind to become confidential, the more so when he told me he had known for some time how I was being treated.

“‘You must not marry that man,’ he said ’It is an outrage for your people to suggest such a thing.  He is a big swell and all that, with heaps of money, but any man in town who knows anything will tell you he is quite impossible,’

“I had heard that, and had told my stepmother, but of course it did not suit her to heed me.  She cared for nothing beyond the fact that I should be a countess, and said so.

“Archie and I talked together for a long time and with the result that in my longing for protection from the powers against me and my indignation at the way I was being treated I had promised when we parted to marry him, and we had planned to elope together that very night.

“At that time we were living at Haynthorpe Hall—­you know it?—­about ten miles from here.  That evening I slipped out of the house after dinner and met Archie, who was waiting for me at a quiet spot outside the village.  His plan was to drive across country to Branchester Junction, where it was not likely we should be noticed or recognized, catch the night train up to town and be married there next morning.  You may imagine the state of desperation—­utter desperation and recklessness—­I was in to have consented to such a thing, but I could see no help for it, and of two evils I seemed to be choosing the least.  The future looked hideously vague and dark; still Jolliffe was capable of being transformed into a decent husband, while the other man assuredly was not.

“Archie seemed overjoyed, poor fellow, as I mounted into the dog-cart; he had hardly expected that I should not repent.  Once we were fairly off and bowling along the dark road, a sense of relief came to me, and whatever qualms I may have felt soon vanished.  However wrong my conduct was I had been driven to it and my father, for whom I was sorry, by taking part against me, deserved to lose me.

“My companion had the tact not to talk much, and I was glad to think he could realize the seriousness of the step he had persuaded me to take.  But the little he did say was affectionately sympathetic and, now that the die was cast, it comforted me to indulge hopes of him.