“I’m a man,” said the Deputy, giving her back the letter, and pocketing the coins, one by one, “as earns his living by the sweat of his brow;” here he drew his sleeve across his forehead, as if this particular portion of his humble gains were the result of sheer hard labour and virtuous industry; “and I won’t stand in your way. Go where you like.”

She was gone out of the lock-house as soon as he gave her this permission, and her tottering steps were on the road again. But, afraid to go back and afraid to go forward; seeing what she fled from, in the sky-glare of the lights of the little town before her, and leaving a confused horror of it everywhere behind her, as if she had escaped it in every stone of every marketplace; she struck off by side ways, among which she got bewildered and lost. That night she took refuge from the Samaritan in his latest accredited form, under a farmer’s rick; and if⁠—worth thinking of, perhaps, my fellow-Christians⁠—the Samaritan had in the lonely night, “passed by on the other side,” she would have most devoutly thanked High Heaven for her escape from him.