Emily heard nothing further . She got up and went blindly back into her room with such agony tearing at her heartstrings that she dully wondered why she could not shriek aloud . Stephen -- her husband -- dying ! In the burning anguish of that moment her own soul was as an open book before her . The love she had buried rose from the deeps of her being in an awful , accusing resurrection . Out of her stupor and pain a purpose formed itself clearly . She must go to Stephen -- she must beg and win his forgiveness before it was too late . She dared not go down to John and ask him to take her to her husband . He might refuse . The Phillipses had been known to do even harder things than that . At the best there would be a storm of protest and objection on her brother 's and sister 's part , and Emily felt that she could not encounter that in her present mood . It would drive her mad . She lit a lamp and dressed herself noiselessly , but with feverish haste . Then she listened . The house was very still . Amelia and John had gone to bed . She wrapped herself in a heavy woollen shawl hanging in the hall and crept downstairs . With numbed fingers she fumbled at the key of the hall door , turned it and slipped out into the night . The storm seemed to reach out and clutch her and swallow her up . She went through the garden , where the flowers already were crushed to earth ; she crossed the long field beyond , where the rain cut her face like a whip and the wind almost twisted her in its grasp like a broken reed .
Somehow or other , more by blind instinct than anything else , she found the path that led XXXXX commons and woods and waste valleys to her lost home .
At With as before from in of than through to