not words. I'll do as I've said if he acts square, and that's enough to start
with."

"All right," said Ferguson, glad enough to escape the caress. "I'll do as I
say."

He did do all he promised, and very promptly, too. He was not capable of
believing that a woman wronged as Alida had been would not prosecute him, and
he was eager to escape to another state, and, in a certain measure, again to
hide his identity under his own actual name.

Meanwhile, how fared the poor creature who had fled, driven forth by her first
wild impulse to escape from a false and terrible position? With every step
she took down the dimly lighted street, the abyss into which she had fallen
seemed to grow deeper and darker. She was overwhelmed with the magnitude of
her misfortune. She shunned the illumined thoroughfares with a half-crazed
sense that every finger would be pointed at her. Her final words, spoken to
Ferguson, were the last clear promptings of her womanly nature. After that,
everything grew confused, except the impression of remediless disaster and
shame. She was incapable of forming any correct judgment concerning her
position. The thought of her pastor filled her with horror. He, she thought,
would take the same view which the woman had so brutally expressed--that in
her eagerness to be married, she had brought to the parsonage an unknown man
and had involved a clergyman in her own scandalous record.--It would all be in
the papers, and her pastor's name mixed up in the affair. She would rather
die than subject him to such an ordeal. Long after, when he learned the facts
in the case, he looked at her very sadly as he asked: "Didn't you know me
better than that? Had I so failed in my preaching that you couldn't come
straight to me?"