For one long hour Ellen never moved. Her brain felt scorched, her limbs utterly powerless. Every word seemed to write itself in letters of fire on her heart and brain, till she could almost have screamed, from the dread agony; and then came the heavy weight, so often felt before, but never crushing every thought and energy as now, the seeming utter impossibility to comply with that fearfully urged demand. _He_ called it a sum so trifling, and _she_ felt a hundred, ay, a thousand pounds were not more difficult to obtain. She had saved, indeed, denying herself every little indulgence, every personal gratification, spending only what she was obliged, and yet compelled to let her aunt believe she had properly expended all, that she might have the means of sending him money when he demanded it, without exposing herself to doubt and displeasure as before; but in the eight months since his last call, she had only been enabled to put by fifteen pounds, not half the sum he needed. How was she to get the rest? and she had so buoyed herself with the fond hope, that even if he did write for help again, she could send it to him so easily--and now--her mind seemed actually to reel beneath the intense agony of these desperate words. She was too young, too believing, and too terror-stricken to doubt for a moment the alternative he placed before her, with a vividness, a desperation, of which he was unconscious himself. Those words spoken, would have been terrible, almost awful in one so young--though a brief interval would have sufficiently calmed both the hearer and the speaker, to satisfy that they were _but words_, and that self-destruction is never breathed, if really intended: but _written_, the writer at a distance, imagination at liberty, to heighten every terror, every reality; their reader a young loving girl, utterly ignorant of the world's ways and temptations, and the many errors to which youth is subject, but from which manhood may spring up unsullied; and so believing, almost crushed by the belief, that her brother, the only one, her own--respected, beloved, as he was said to be--had yet committed such faults, as would hurl him from his present position to the lowest depth of degradation, for what else could tempt him, to swear not to survive it? Was it marvel, that poor Ellen was only conscious that she must save him?--Again did her dying mother stand before her--again did her well-remembered voice beseech her to save him her darling, beautiful Edward, from disgrace and punishment--reiterate that her word was pledged, and she _must_ do it, and if she suffered--had she not done so from infancy--and what was her happiness to his? Define why it should be of less moment, indeed, she could not. It was the fatal influences of her childhood working alone.