ve you out and strip the clothes off your back! You don't
hang me for nothing. D--n you, we are three miles from anywhere, and I
have a mind to gag you, whether or no! And I will too, if you so much as
open your squeaker again!'

'Let me go,' she cried faintly. 'Let me go.'

'Oh, you will be let go fast enough--the other side of the water,' he
answered, with a villainous laugh. 'I'm bail to that. In the meantime
keep a still tongue, or it will be the worse for you! Once out of
Bristol, and you may pipe as you like!'

The girl fell back in her corner with a low wail of despair. The man
seeing the effect he had wrought, laughed his triumph, and in sheer
brutality passed his light once or twice across her face. Then he closed
the door with a crash and mounted; the carriage bounded forward again,
and in a trice was travelling onward as rapidly as before.

Night had set in, and darkness, a darkness that could almost be felt,
reigned in the interior of the chaise. Neither of the travellers could
now see the other, though they sat within arm's length. The tutor, as
soon as they were well started, and his nerves, shaken by the man's
threats, permitted him to think of anything save his own safety, began
to wonder that his companion, who had been so forward before, did not
now speak; to look for her to speak, and to find the darkness and this
silence, which left him to feed on his fears, strangely uncomfortable.
He could almost believe that she was no longer there. At length, unable
to bear it longer, he spoke.

'I suppose you know,' he said--he was growing vexed with the girl who
had brought him into this peril--'who is at the bottom of this?'

She did not answer, or rather she answered only by a sudden burst of
weeping; not the light, facile weeping of a woman crossed or
over-fretted, or frightened; but the convulsive heart-rending sobbing of
utter grief and abandonment.

The tutor heard, and was at first astonished, then alarmed. 'My dear,
good girl, don't cry like that,' he said awkwardly. 'Don't! I--I don't
understand it. You--you frighten me. You--you really should not. I only
asked you if you knew whose work this was.'

'I know! I know only too well!' she cried passionately. 'God help me!
God help all women!'

Mr. Thomasson wondered whether she referred to the future and her own
fate. In that case, her complete surrender to despair seemed strange,
seemed even inexplicable, in one who a few minutes before had show