"Then," said I suddenly, "this was doubtless the reason why he fled the country--lest any should inform against him."
"That is so," he answered; "and a narrow escape he has had; for if he had fought as he desired he might well have been in my place this day."
"In Elizabeth Gaunt's rather!" I answered. "He would himself have died at the stake before he could have been brought to betray the woman that had helped him."
"You had a poorer opinion of him a short while ago."
"I knew not the world. I knew not men. I knew not _you_. Go! Go! Take away your miserable life--for which two good and useful lives have been given--and make what you can of it. I would--coward as I am--go back to my mistress and die with her rather than have any share in it!"
He tarried no more, and I was left alone. Not a creature came near me. It may be that my neighbours had seen him enter, and thought of me with horror as a condoner of his crime; it may be that they were afraid to meddle with a house that had fallen into so terrible a trouble; or that the frightful hurricane that burst forth and raged that day (as if to show that God's anger was aroused and His justice, though delayed, not forgotten) kept them trembling in their houses.
What would have befallen me if I had been left long alone in that great and evil city I know not, for I had no wits left to make any plans for myself. At nightfall, however, there came once more a knocking, and when I opened the door my father stood on the threshold. There seemed no strangeness in his presence, and I fell into his arms weeping, so that he, seeing how grievous had been my punishment, forbore to make any reproach.
The next day began our journey home, and I have never since returned to London; but when I got back to the place I had so foolishly left I found it sadder than before. Many friends were gone away or dead. Some honest lads, with whom I had jested at fair-times, hung withering on the ghastly gallows by the wayside; others lay in unknown graves; others languished in gaol or on board ship. My father's own brother, though his life was spared, had been sent away to the plantations to be sold, and to work as a slave.
It was some time before Tom Windham--that had, at considerable risk to himself, sent my father to fetch me--ventured to settle again in his old place; and for a long time after that he was shy of addressing me.