The Way of All Flesh

About a year earlier, Christina hired a pretty, 18-year-old girl named Ellen as a housemaid. During his visits home, Ernest grew very fond of her, though not in a romantic sense. Upon returning home at midsummer, Ernest is surprised to find Ellen looking ill and distraught. Christina asks a doctor to examine her, and he finds that she is pregnant. Determined not to be seen as tolerating “so great a sin” (126), Christina and Theobald decide to send Ellen away immediately. Christina momentarily wonders whether Ernest could be the father of Ellen’s child, but she dismisses the possibility.

Ernest returns from elsewhere just in time to see Ellen leaving in the carriage driven by the coachman, John. Seeing the cook crying, he asks what happened. After swearing him to secrecy, she tells him. Feeling sorry for Ellen, Ernest runs after the carriage, taking a shortcut and catching up to it several miles from the house. He offers the little money he has, along with a knife and a watch that Alethea gave him, to Ellen. At the John’s insistence, she accepts.

As he waits to catch the carriage on its return journey, Ernest wonders what to tell his parents.