Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/139

 

seemed to be with the greatest reluctance, that the poor girl carried back her recollection to that terrible day which had separated us, as we then thought, forever. She hesitated, — and seemed half ashamed, and almost unwilling to speak of what had followed after that separation. I pitied her; and great as was my curiosity — if my feelings on that occasion deserve so trifling a name — I could almost have wished her to pass over the interval in silence. Distressing doubts and dreadful apprehensions crowded upon me, and I almost dreaded to hear her speak. But she hid her face in my bosom, and murmuring in a voice half choked with sobs, "My husband must know it." — she began her story.

She was already, she told me, more than half dead with fright and horror, and the first blow that colonel Moore struck, beat her senseless to the ground. When she came to her senses, she found herself lying on a bed, in a room which she did not recollect ever to have seen before. She rose from the bed as well as her bruises would allow her; for she did not move without difficulty. The room was prettily furnished; the bed was hung with curtains, neat and comfortable; a dressing table stood in one corner; and there was all the usual furniture of a lady's bed-chamber, — but it was not like any room in the house at Spring-Meadow.