For as yet nothing had been changed, nothing had been moved.  How fitting this was, Antoinette knew better than anybody else, perhaps, for she was the only person whom Elvira Brown had ever allowed to spend any length of time with her, and she could remember—­alas! how vividly, in spite of the one great fear forever gnawing at her heart—­that an article, no matter how small, when once given place in this house, held that place always till broken or in some other way robbed of its usefulness.  She looked at her friend’s pet chair standing just in the one spot where she had seen it eight years before, and her heart swelled, and a tear rose in her eye.  But there was not time for another.  A sense of the straits in which she found herself placed by the death of this dependable friend returned upon her in full force; the past retired into its old place, and the present, with its maddening problems, seized upon her nerve and quelled her once indomitable spirit.

The fate which had pursued her ever since she had left her happy home in France had not spared her at this crisis.  The storm, of so little consequence to her, had roused the driver’s sympathy.  This had not only fixed her image in his mind but given away her destination.  All hope of hiding herself among the mountains was therefore gone.  She would have to move on; but where?  If she were but able to leave now, she might before morning find some covert from which help might be given her for further escape.  But the condition of the roads, as well as her own weakness, forbade that.  She needed food:  she needed sleep.  Of food she would find plenty, she was sure; but sleep!  How could she sleep, with the promise of the morrow before her?  Yet she must; everything depended upon her strength.  How could she win that rest which alone would secure it.

Pausing in the midst of the hall whither her restless thought had driven her, she stared in a fruitless inquiry at the wall confronting her.  Her mind, like her feet, was at a standstill.  She could neither think nor act.  In fact, she was at the point of a nervous collapse, when slowly from out the void there rose to her view and pierced its way into her mind the outline of the door upon which she had been steadily looking but without seeing it till now.  Why did she start as it thus took on shape before her?  There was nothing strange or mysterious about it.  It led nowhere; it hid nothing, unless it was the yard upon which it directly opened.

But that yard!  She remembered it well.  It was unlike any other she had ever seen in this country or her own.  It was small and semicircular; it was shut in by a high board fence except at the extreme end, where it was met by a swinging bridge topping a forty-foot chasm.  That bridge led through a sparsely wooded forest to a road running in a quite different direction from the one by which the house was approached.  As she strove to recall her memories of it, she became more and more assured that her one and only opportunity for a successful flight lay that way.  Moved to joy at the thought, she bowed her head for one wild moment in heartfelt thankfulness and then quickly drew the bolts of the door which offered her this happy deliverance.