Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment.  At the end of that moment the story seemed almost old to her.  It was a natural ending of the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her earliest years.  When she got large and strong enough, she broke out of jail,—­that was all.  The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or later, whether it is a wooden or an iron one.  Olive felt as if she had dimly foreseen just such a finishing to the tragedy of the poor girl’s home bringing-up.  Why could not she have done something to prevent it?  Well,—­what shall we do now, and as it is?—­that is the question.

“Has she left no letter,—­no explanation of her leaving in this way?”

“Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows.”

“Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter.  I think we shall.”

Olive’s sagacity and knowledge of her friend’s character had not misled her.  She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she opened and read as here follows: 

My dearest Olive:—­Think no evil of me for what I have done.  The fire-hang-bird’s nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor bird is flown.

I can live as I have lived no longer.  This place is chilling all the life out of me, and I must find another home.  It is far, far away, and you will not hear from me again until I am there.  Then I will write to you.

You know where I was born,—­under a hot sun and in the midst of strange, lovely scenes that I seem still to remember.  I must visit them again:  my heart always yearns for them.  And I must cross the sea to get there,—­the beautiful great sea that I have always longed for and that my river has been whispering about to me ever so many years.  My life is pinched and starved here.  I feel as old as aunt Silence, and I am only fifteen,—­a child she has called me within a few days.  If this is to be a child, what is it to be a woman?

I love you dearly,—­and your brother is almost to me as if he were mine.  I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,—­yes, and the old man that has spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to give you pain,—­to leave you all,—­but my way of life is killing me, and I am too young to die.  I cannot take the comfort with you, my dear friends, that I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of ice in my heart, and all the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.

I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive.  Do you remember how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to flee into Egypt?  I have had a dream like that, Olive.  There is an old belief in our family that the spirit of one who died many generations ago watches over some of her descendants.  They say it led our first ancestor to come over here when it was a wilderness.  I believe it has appeared to others of the family in times of trouble.  I have had a strange dream at any rate, and the one I saw, or thought I saw, told me to leave this place.  Perhaps I should have stayed if it had not been for that, but it seemed like an angel’s warning.