The sexton found her there in the shadow, when he locked the church doors.

“Meg! you here?  What ails you?”

“Dying, I suppose!”

The sight of her touched the man, she lying there alone in the snow; he lingered, hesitated, thought of his own warm home, looked at her again.  If a friendly hand should save the creature,—­he had heard of such things.  Well?  But how could he take her into his respectable home?  What would people say?—­the sexton of the Temple!  He had a little wife there too, pure as the snow upon the ground to-night.  Could he bring them under the same roof?

“Meg!” he said, speaking in his nervous way, though kindly, “you will die here.  I’ll call the police and let them take you where it’s warmer.”

But she crawled to her feet again.

“No you won’t!”

She walked away as fast as she was able, till she found a still place down by the water, where no one could see her.  There she stood a moment irresolute, looked up through the storm as if searching for the sky, then sank upon her knees down in the silent shade of some timber.

Perhaps she was half-frightened at the act, for she knelt so a moment without speaking.  There she began to mutter:  “Maybe He won’t drive me off; if they did, maybe he won’t.  I should just like to tell him, anyway!”

So she folded her hands, as she had folded them once at her mother’s knee.

“O Lord!  I’m tired of being Meg.  I should like to be something else!”

Then she rose, crossed the bridge, and on past the thinning houses, walking feebly through the snow that drifted against her feet.

She did not know why she was there, or where she was going.  She repeated softly to herself now and then the words uttered down in the shade of the timber, her brain dulled by the cold, faint, floating dreams stealing into them.

Meg! tired of being Meg!  She wasn’t always that.  It was another name, a pretty name she thought, with a childish smile,—­Maggie.  They always call her that.  She used to play about among the clover-blossoms and buttercups then; the pure little children used to kiss her; nobody hooted after her in the street, or drove her out of church, or left her all alone out in the snow,—­Maggie!

Perhaps, too, some vague thought came to her of the mournful, unconscious prophecy of the name, as the touch of the sacred water upon her baby-brow had sealed it,—­Magdalene.

She stopped a moment, weakened by her toiling against the wind, threw off her hood, the better to catch her laboring breath, and standing so, looked back at the city, its lights glimmering white and pale, through the falling snow.

Her face was a piteous sight just then.  Do you think the haughtiest of the pure, fair women in yonder treasured homes could have loathed her as she loathed herself at that moment?

Yet it might have been a face as fair and pure as theirs; kisses of mother and husband might have warmed those drawn and hueless lips; they might have prayed their happy prayers, every night and morning, to God.  It might have been.  You would almost have thought he had meant it should be so, if you had looked into her eyes sometimes,—­perhaps when she was on her knees by the timber; or when she listened to the chant, crouching out of sight in the church.