She had underrated her strength.  She broke into a storm of weeping which shook to the very soul one of the two men who listened to her, though he made no move to comfort her or allay it.  The alienation thus expressed produced its effect, and, stricken deeper than the fount of tears, she suddenly choked back every sob and took up the thread of her narrative with the calmness born of despair,

“These were the words, these and no others: 

“’If my niece will break all ties and come to me completely unhampered, she may hope to find a permanent home in my house and a close hold upon my affections.

IraT. Houghtaling.’

“Unhampered! with the marriage-vow scarcely cold on my lips!  Without tie! and a husband waiting below to take me to his home on the hillside—­a hillside so bare and bleak that the sight of it had sent a shudder to my heart as the wedding ring touched my finger.  The irony of the situation was more than I could endure, and alone, with my eyes fixed on the comfortless heavens, showing gray and cold through the narrow panes of my windows, I sank to the floor insensible.

“When I came to myself I was still alone, and the twilight a little more pronounced than when my misery had turned it to blackest midnight.  Rising, I read that letter again, and, plainly as the acknowledgment betrays the selfishness lying at the basis of my character, the temptation which thereupon seized me had never an instant of relenting or one conscientious scruple to combat it.  I simply, at that stage in my life and experience, could not do otherwise than I did.  Saying to myself that vows, as empty of heart as mine, were void before God and man, I sat down and wrote a few words to the man whose step on the stair I dreaded above everything else in the world; and, leaving the note on the table, unlocked my door and looked out.  The hall connecting with my room was empty, but not so the lower one.  There I could hear voices and laughter, Mr. Brainard’s loud above all the rest,—­a fatal sound to me, cutting off all escape in that direction.  But another way offered and that one near at hand.  Communicating with the very hall in which I stood was an outside staircase running down to the road—­a means of entering and leaving a house which I never see now wherever I may encounter it, without a gush of inward shame and terror, so instinctive and so sharp that I have never been able to hide it from any one whose eye might chance to be upon me at the moment.  But that night I was conscious of no shame, barely of any terror, only of the necessity for haste.  The train on which I was determined to fly was due in a little less than an hour at a station two miles down the road.

“That I should be followed farther than the turbulent stream which crossed the road only a quarter of a mile from the hotel, I did not fear.  For in the hurried note I had left behind me, I had bidden them to look for me there, saying that I had been precipitate in marrying one I did not really love, and, overcome by a sense of my mistake, I was resolved on death.