Edith was brought out early.  Mrs. Dinneford could not wait.  At seventeen she was thrust into society, set up for sale to the highest bidder, her condition nearer that of a Circassian than a Christian maiden, with her mother as slave-dealer.

So it was and so, it is.  You may see the thing every day.  But it did not come out according to Mrs. Dinneford’s programme.  There was a highest bidder; but when he came for his slave, she was not to be found.

Well, the story is trite and brief—­the old sad story.  Among her suitors was a young man named Granger, and to him Edith gave her heart.  But the mother rejected him with anger and scorn.  He was not rich, though belonging to a family of high character, and so fell far below her requirements.  Under a pressure that almost drove the girl to despair, she gave her consent to a marriage that looked more terrible than death.  A month before the time fixed for, its consummation, she barred the contract by a secret union with Granger.

Edith knew her mother’s character too well to hope for any reconciliation, so far as Mr. Granger was concerned.  Coming in as he had done between her and the consummation of her highest ambition, she could never feel toward him anything but the most bitter hatred; and so, after remaining at home for about a week after her secret marriage, she wrote this brief letter to her mother and went away: 

“My dear mother:  I do not love Spencer Wray, and would rather die than marry him, and so I have made the marriage to which my heart has never consented, an impossibility.  You have left me no other alternative but this.  I am the wife of George Granger, and go to cast my lot with his.

“Your loving daughter,

“Edith.”

To her father she wrote: 

“My dear, dear father:  If I bring sorrow to your good and loving heart by what I have done, I know that it will be tempered with joy at my escape from a union with one from whom my soul has ever turned with irrepressible dislike.  Oh, my father, you can understand, if mother cannot, into what a desperate strait I have been brought.  I am a deer hunted to the edge of a dizzy chasm, and I leap for life over the dark abyss, praying for strength to reach the farther edge.  If I fail in the wild effort, I can only meet destruction; and I would rather be bruised to death on the jagged rocks than trust myself to the hounds and hunters.  I write passionately—­you will hardly recognize your quiet child; but the repressed instincts of my nature are strong, and peril and despair have broken their bonds.  I did not consult you about the step I have taken, because I dared not trust you with my secret.  You would have tried to hold me back from the perilous leap, fondly hoping for some other way of escape.  I had resolved on putting an impassable gulf between me and danger, if I died in the attempt.  I have taken the leap, and may God care for me!