As it grew late

Her final words, spoken to Ferguson, were the last clear promptings of her womanly nature.  After that, everything grew confused, except the impression of remediless disaster and shame.  She was incapable of forming any correct judgment concerning her position.  The thought of her pastor filled her with horror.  He, she thought, would take the same view which the woman had so brutally expressed--that in her eagerness to be married, she had brought to the parsonage an unknown man and had involved a clergyman in her own scandalous record.--It would all be in the papers, and her pastor's name mixed up in the affair.  She would rather die than subject him to such an ordeal.  Long after, when he learned the facts in the case, he looked at her very sadly as he asked: "Didn't you know me better than that?  Had I so failed in my preaching that you couldn't come straight to me?" She wondered afterward that she had not done this, but she was too morbid, too close upon absolute insanity, to do what was wise and safe.  She simply yielded to the wild impulse to escape, to cower, to hide from every human eye, hastening through the darkest, obscurest streets, not caring where.  In the confusion of her mind she would retrace her steps, and soon was utterly lost, wandering she knew not whither.  As it grew late, casual passers-by looked after her curiously, rough men spoke to her, and others jeered.  She only hastened on, driven by her desperate trouble like the wild, ragged clouds that were flying across the stormy March sky. At last a policeman said gruffly, "You've passed me twice.  You can't be roaming the streets at this time of night.  Why don't you go home?" Standing before him and wringing her hands, she moaned, "I have no home." "Where did you come from?" "Oh, I can't tell you! Take me to any place where a woman will be safe." "I can't take you to any place now but the station house." "But can I be alone there?  I won't be put with anybody?"