Near a milestone, under the moonlight, crouched the figure of a woman, huddled with her head against her knees, and careless hair falling to the summer’s dust.  Evan came upon this sight within a few miles of Fallowfield.  At first he was rather startled, for he had inherited superstitious emotions from his mother, and the road was lone, the moon full.  He went up to her and spoke a gentle word, which provoked no reply.  He ventured to put his hand on her shoulder, continuing softly to address her.  She was flesh and blood.  Evan stooped his head to catch a whisper from her mouth, but nothing save a heavier fall of the breath she took, as of one painfully waking, was heard.

A misery beyond our own is a wholesome picture for youth, and though we may not for the moment compare the deep with the lower deep, we, if we have a heart for outer sorrows, can forget ourselves in it.  Evan had just been accusing the heavens of conspiracy to disgrace him.  Those patient heavens had listened, as is their wont.  They had viewed and had not been disordered by his mental frenzies.  It is certainly hard that they do not come down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments the argument, for instance, that they have not fashioned us for the science of the shears, and do yet impel us to wield them.  Nevertheless, they to whom mortal life has ceased to be a long matter perceive that our appeals for conviction are answered, now and then very closely upon the call.  When we have cast off the scales of hope and fancy, and surrender our claims on mad chance, it is given us to see that some plan is working out:  that the heavens, icy as they are to the pangs of our blood, have been throughout speaking to our souls; and, according to the strength there existing, we learn to comprehend them.  But their language is an element of Time, whom primarily we have to know.

Evan Harrington was young.  He wished not to clothe the generation.  What was to the remainder of the exiled sons of Adam simply the brand of expulsion from Paradise, was to him hell.  In his agony, anything less than an angel, soft-voiced in his path, would not have satisfied the poor boy, and here was this wretched outcast, and instead of being relieved, he was to act the reliever!

Striving to rouse the desolate creature, he shook her slightly.  She now raised her head with a slow, gradual motion, like that of a wax-work, showing a white young face, tearless,-dreadfully drawn at the lips.  After gazing at him, she turned her head mechanically to her shoulder, as to ask him why he touched her.  He withdrew his hand, saying: 

‘Why are you here?  Pardon me; I want, if possible, to help you.’

A light sprang in her eyes.  She jumped from the stone, and ran forward a step or two, with a gasp: 

‘Oh, my God!  I want to go and drown myself.’