#48 (Subscription)

She did not suspect the author of her misfortune was Maurice. But she knew, from the heavy sun of an august September, that someone had planned to the minutest particular an accident involving her virtue. She was, in the parlance of the times, fearfully riding the hatch. Each page of correspondence she penned was vexed by the same terrible fear, that the effects of her former labor would have her as their victim.

It was a reasonable worry, for which the gradual change in temperature and the modish stylings of a new wardrobe offered little distraction. What she needed, now most of all during the season's regular influx of teachers and students, was some spiritual confirmation, a link-boy sent by the muses to illuminate the path before her. She ate and drank without notice of nutrition, read for a change what pleased her, and sat up at night singing tunes her mother had been taught by her mother, and so forth.

By what route she finally reached her decision, I cannot say nor hazard an hypothesis. Everything depends on the progression's exact obscurity, like the random but ever-precise skipping of a phonograph needle across the grooves of the disc beneath it. Her heart had been from the first committed to resistance; and the rhythm, bereft of formula, by which it eventually persisted can be but partly understood as the despearte measure needed to once and for all escape her pursuers. She was, it can be said for certain, a young woman of twenty-seven, slender figured, with eyes of the utmost passivity. Her final letter was no less than the length of a library.