No more affecting proof could have been given of her prostrated mind and will than this unreserved recital. The secret she had sold conscience and liberty to preserve, she communicated now without a blush. Here--where she had formed the intimacy that had shadowed so darkly her after days--she detailed every step of the wrong course to which this weakness was a key; went over all--the stormy parting with her husband; her conviction of the mutual peril she and Philip were tempting in their daily communion; her resolve of self-destruction--as circumstantially as if she were relating the biography of another. Aunt Sarah, horrified and pitiful by turns, struggled with indifferent success to maintain equal composure, and against growing doubts of the narrator's sanity. It was a striking and instructive contrast: the world-weary woman returning for consolation and advice to the simple-minded matron, to whom the artificial existence she now heard depicted--its gilded vices and giddy round of vanities; its trials and temptations--were a wonderful, a monstrous tale, as foreign to her sphere of principles and feelings as if they had transpired in another world. But when Sarah came to speak of her child, her manner changed, her voice was hoarse and uneven, and over the careworn visage there went such alterations of fierceness and heart-breaking sorrow that the listening mother, upon whose soul the shadow of her own children's graves still lay long and dark, could hear no more in silence. "My poor girl!" she cried, falling on her knees, and throwing her arms around the reclining figure. "Dear child! Our Father in heaven pity and comfort you! There is no help in man for such trouble as yours!" Sarah had not shed a tear in the course of her story. She said afterwards that she had not wept since they took her dead baby from her clasp; but at this burst of unfeigned sympathy, this gush of pure love and compassion, the burning rock was cleft, and a blessed flood streamed from it. For some minutes they wept together without restraint, and when the more quiet grief of the elder mourner was repressed, the other still clung, sobbing to her bosom. Aunt Sarah held and soothed her as she would have done a sorrowful child; stroking away the hair from her forehead, drying and kissing the tear-stained cheeks, with many an epithet of fond reassurance. "Let me finish! There is very little more!" resumed Sarah, keeping her aunt's hand fast in both of hers. "We went back to the city, and the next day we laid her in Greenwood. We stayed at father's--I would not return to the house that used to be mine. Father was very kind, and mother meant to be; but she tormented me with suggestions and consultations about my black clothes. Lucy was pining to get back to Newport. She said it was hot and dull in New York. Philip wanted to comfort me, but I shunned him, and I think he was hurt by my conduct; but it was best, was it not, Aunt Sarah?" "Certainly, dear!"