He had slipped in, with handkerchief over his face, just before Mrs. Laylor went out. She told him that she was going to the railroad depot to meet a young woman from the country, a dress-maker, whom she had sent for, to come and make a few dresses for her and "my daughter," as she unblushingly, called Nannette, who, she said, "had been away from home, at school." The words were true, yet the speech was a lie, a wicked lie, made to deceive one who had been unwary enough to put his finger in a trap. She had been away from home, a home where she left a mother, and brothers, and sisters. And she had been at school--a school where language and manners are taught; but, oh! what language, and what ways, and manners. It is a school which is computed to have thirty thousand teachers in this city. What strange inconsistencies our human nature is possessed of. This Nannette had naturally a good heart. We saw that in the scene where Mrs. Morgan discovers the depth of depravity to which one of those teachers had dragged down her husband. Yet, no sooner is Athalia placed by misfortune in a position to be subject to temptation, than she offers her gratuitous services to Mrs. Laylor, to effect her complete ruin. What for? Who can answer? I cannot, unless the fable of the fox that lost his tail in a trap, will give a cue to the solution. I fear, that we are too apt to wish others no better than ourselves. It must have been some such motive that actuated Nannette: the little pecuniary advantage offered by Mrs. Laylor for her assistance, does not seem to be a sufficient motive for one female, though she herself has lost the priceless jewel of female virtue, to wish to bring another of her sex into that vortex which engulfs all who come within its maeelstrom power, as certain as that upon the Norway coast. Be the motive what it may, she had certainly lent herself this day, as a willing tool, to do a double deed of wrong. I cannot name the clergyman who was to be made--had been made--the victim in this nefarious plot, because he is still living, and has paid the penalty of ruined health for visiting such a house, and a still greater penalty of a gnawing conscience for the sin, and the lies told to cover it up. As a _nom de plume_, I will call him, Otis, because it is the most dissimilar to his own, of any one I can think of.