The Abandoned Bride by Edith Layton

that she was bidding fair to becoming a beauty. When Robin had arrived suddenly to visit with her father’s employer, Lord Quincy, he had seemed to her to be a prince from out of one of the fairytales she had just left off reading. When he deigned to speak with her that first time they met on a country lane, she had been staggered that he had even noted her existence upon the earth. He might have become, as he should have become, an idealized standard of masculinity that she could base her future choice of husband upon when she had grown to adulthood. But he had continued to meet her by chance, and then by happy accident, and then, finally, by secret arrangement. And he became instead of her distant ideal, her betrothed.
    However much her family had comforted her after she had returned home that night, exhausted and confused, it had not been enough. It could never be enough to shield her from the criticism of the outside world. If Lord Quincy and his family had been appalled at their factor’s daughter’s sly behavior when he had, full of pride, prematurely announced her wedding to their honored guest, there were no polite words to describe their reaction to her ignoble return. Neither could Julia discount neighbor women’s whispers, nor could she pretend to ignore their menfolk’s calculating stares for long.
    It soon became apparent to her that she had not only destroyed her own future, but that she had jeopardized others’ as well. The local people shook their heads and opined that Mr. Hastings had got above himself, thinking to marry his daughter into his betters’ class. Lord Quincy and his family decidedly agreed. It wasn’t long before Lord Quincy himself began to drop ponderous hints about renovations the estate needed that a younger man might find easier to implement. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he had jested, sending his factor home that night looking a score older than his actual years. Julia had four sisters, one already of an age for matrimony, and as the attitude of the local bachelors changed toward her, it subtly altered toward her sisters as well. They never said so, but when Dorothea went walking out with young Alan Baines, and came running home alone, her face flushed and stained with hastily wiped tears, her sister knew what had transpired as surely as if she had been there to see the familiarity which had been rebuffed.
    No, it was time for her to be gone, Julia had vowed, despite all their pleas for her to remain. A shadow cannot fall if there is no one about to blot out the sun, she insisted. And so, armed with a letter from the vicar, whose job it was, after all, to forgive all transgressors, and a letter to the Misses Parkinson, whose job it was to find jobs for all idle young females regardless of their morality, she went.
    The family saw her off again with tears in their eyes. But this time they did not shed tears of happiness, and this time she did not return.
    Julia finished her packing and stared about the room, which now looked naked without her little picture frames upon the nightstand, and her sister’s samplers on the wall above the bed. A jumble of oddments still remained upon the nightstand, however. She had decided that in light of present circumstances, it would not be fitting for her to pack away those many tokens of esteem her employer had pressed upon her during her brief orgy of atonement.
    As she lay down upon her bed, Julia thought of Toby, whom she had left an hour ago, rosy and talc-covered, still damp from his bath and the sleep which had overtaken him just as the princess lost her golden ball down the well. That memory she would take with her, she mused on a sleepy smile, and the visions of the mustard fields, this room, Old Joseph, the village people, even Mrs. Bryce in those days before the deranged baron had called upon them. She would stay on a few more days and then, even if the letter she awaited did not arrive, she would go. She had done it before,