small oil-lamp was still flickering. What was he going
to do to her? She thought every moment he was going to dash her before
him on the ground. But she gave no scream--she only trembled.

He pushed her on to the entrance, and held her firmly in his grasp while
he lifted the latch of the door. Then he opened the door a little way,
thrust her out, and slammed it behind her.

For a short space, it seemed like a deliverance to Janet. The harsh
north-east wind, that blew through her thin night-dress, and sent her
long heavy black hair streaming, seemed like the breath of pity after the
grasp of that threatening monster. But soon the sense of release from an
overpowering terror gave way before the sense of the fate that had really
come upon her.

This, then, was what she had been travelling towards through her long
years of misery! Not yet death. O! if she had been brave enough for it,
death would have been better. The servants slept at the back of the
house; it was impossible to make them hear, so that they might let her in
again quietly, without her husband's knowledge. And she would not have
tried. He had thrust her out, and it should be for ever.

There would have been dead silence in Orchard Street but for the
whistling of the wind and the swirling of the March dust on the pavement.
Thick clouds covered the sky; every door was closed; every window was
dark. No ray of light fell on the tall white figure that stood in lonely
misery on the doorstep; no eye rested on Janet as she sank down on the
cold stone, and looked into the dismal night. She seemed to be looking
into her own blank future.

Chapter 15

The stony street, the bitter north-east wind and darkness--and in the
midst of them a tender woman thrust out from her husband's home in her
thin night-dress, the harsh wind cutting her naked feet, and driving her
long hair away from her half-clad bosom, where the poor heart is crushed
with anguish and despair.

The drowning man, urged by the supreme agony, lives in an instant through
all his happy and unhappy past: when the dark flood has fallen like a
curtain, memory, in a single moment, sees the drama acted over again. And
even in those earlier crises, which are but types of death--when we are
cut off abruptly from the life we have known, when we can no longer
expect tomorrow to resemble yesterday, and find ourselves by some sudden
shock on the confines of the unknown--there is often the same sort of
li