I think at that moment I could have killed her, so bitter was the hatred which I felt towards her; but the next brought its crushing shame, taking away from me all but the desire to hide myself from every eye.  Where should I go?  Somewhere where nobody could find me, where I could be insured perfect solitude.  It was not difficult to bury myself in the forest that pressed around me on every side, and a few minutes saw me struggling with the embarrassments of the tangled vines which obstructed the path up our steepest hill.  There was in the very difficulties to be overcome something that seemed to bring me relief; they forced my mind from myself.  On, on I went, as if my life depended upon my struggles, till, breathless and utterly exhausted, I had reached the top of the hill, the highest point for miles around.

I sank down on the cool grass, the fresh wind blowing on my face, and, too wearied to think, shut my eyes against the beautiful Nature around me, alive only to my own overpowering misery.  How long I lay there I never knew.  I was safe and alone.  I could be wretched as I pleased, away from Miss Hammond’s mocking eye, away from the sight of George Hammond’s happiness.  But, strangely enough, out of the very freedom to be miserable came at last a sense of relief.  I looked my wretchedness full in the face.  Could I not bear it?  And there rose within me a strength I had not known before.  I was young, I had a long life before me; it could not be but that this great sorrow would pass away.  At least, I would not nourish it.  I would do what I could to help myself.  Help myself!  For the first time in my life I put up an earnest prayer for help out of myself.  The words, coming as such words come but few times in life, out from the very depths of the heart, brought with them their softening influence.  The tears sprung forth, those tears which I thought I should never shed again, and I burst into a passionate fit of crying, the passionate crying of a child.  It shook me from head to foot with its hysterical convulsions, but it left me at last calmer, soothed into stillness, with only now and then those choking after-sobs which I, child like, sent forth there on the bosom of the only mother I had ever known,—­our kindly mother Earth.

The sun was going down when I rose up, soothed and comforted, and strengthened, too, for a time.  I would do what I could.  I would live down this grief:  how I knew not, but the way would come to me.  And gathering up my hair, which had fallen around me, I stopped, on my way home, by a running stream, and bathed my eyes and forehead until I was fit to appear before my step-mother.  She did not question me; she was too used to my unexplained absences since I had grown out of her control.  Sufficient for her that my tasks were always performed; sufficient for her, that, that very evening, I threw myself with an apparently untiring energy into the household work,—­that I never rested a moment till she herself closed the house and insisted that I should go to bed.  I slept that night,—­after such fatigue, it was impossible but that I should,—­and woke in the morning with a renewed determination to struggle against my sorrow.