e room to send
Florence to her aunt's rescue:

"We ought to tell you more. But she's our dear sister's child."

Florence, I remember, received me with a chalk-pale face and the
exclamation:

"Have those old cats been saying anything against me?" But I assured
her that they had not and hurried her into the room of her strangely
afflicted relatives. I had really forgotten all about that exclamation
of Florence's until this moment. She treated me so very well--with such
tact--that, if I ever thought of it afterwards I put it down to her deep
affection for me.

And that evening, when I went to fetch her for a buggy-ride, she had
disappeared. I did not lose any time. I went into New York and engaged
berths on the "Pocahontas", that was to sail on the evening of the
fourth of the month, and then, returning to Stamford, I tracked out, in
the course of the day, that Florence had been driven to Rye Station.
And there I found that she had taken the cars to Waterbury. She had, of
course, gone to her uncle's. The old man received me with a stony, husky
face. I was not to see Florence; she was ill; she was keeping her room.
And, from something that he let drop--an odd Biblical phrase that I have
forgotten--I gathered that all that family simply did not intend her to
marry ever in her life.

I procured at once the name of the nearest minister and a rope
ladder--you have no idea how primitively these matters were arranged in
those days in the United States. I daresay that may be so still. And
at one o'clock in the morning of the 4th of August I was standing in
Florence's bedroom. I was so one-minded in my purpose that it never
struck me there was anything improper in being, at one o'clock in the
morning, in Florence's bedroom. I just wanted to wake her up. She was
not, however, asleep. She expected me, and her relatives had only just
left her. She received me with an embrace of a warmth.... Well, it was
the first time I had ever been embraced by a woman--and it was the last
when a woman's embrace has had in it any warmth for me.... I suppose it
was my own fault, what followed. At any rate, I was in such a hurry
to get the wedding over, and was so afraid of her relatives finding me
there, that I must have received her advances with a certain amount of
absence of mind. I was out of that room and down the ladder in under
half a minute. She kept me waiting at the foot an unconscionable
time--it was certainly three in the morning bef