It was long before Miss Hart recovered her consciousness, and when she did, and endeavoured to speak, she felt such an excruciating pain in her jaw, as prevented her utterance. It seemed a remarkable instance of the retribution of Providence, that she should be afflicted in the very part which she had made an instrument of so much evil to others. Her jawbone was indeed broken, and there she lay, writhing in agony, incapable of speech, indebted to the beings she hated because she had injured, for the cares that prolonged her miserable existence. She could not speak, but she could see and hear, and her senses seemed sharpened by the bondage of her tongue. Mrs. Wentworth, and Lois too, hovered round her, with gentle steps and pitying looks, and the tenderest alleviations; and for this she might have been prepared. But when, through the shades of evening, she heard the deep voice of the once haughty and ungovernable Captain Wentworth, breathing forth humble and heartfelt prayers, while his wife knelt meek and lowly by his side, when she heard the gay and gallant Henry More, reading with reverence God's holy word, and joining with Lois in hymns to the Redeemer's praise, she rolled her eyes in wild amazement, and her dark spirit was troubled within her. "There seems a reality in this," thought she. "The worldling become the saint, and the lion transformed into the lamb! How happy they look, while I--poor, wretched, mangled creature that I am!" Paroxysms of agony followed these reflections, for which there seemed no mitigation. She lingered for a long time speechless and in great suffering, but at length recovered with a frightful distortion in the lower part of the face. When she first beheld herself in a mirror, the shock was so great as to produce delirium, and when that subsided, a gloom and despair succeeded, from which they vainly endeavoured to rouse her by the soothings of sympathy and the consolations of religion. She felt that, like Cain, she must carry about an indelible brand upon her face, and cried like him, in bitterness of spirit, "My punishment is greater than I can bear." It was intolerable to her to look upon the fair, serene countenances of Mrs. Wentworth and Lois, and to see too the eyes of their husbands follow them with such love and delight, and then to draw the contrast between them and her own disfigured beauty and desolate lot. She expressed a wish to be sent to her relatives, and the wish was not opposed. She received from them a grudging welcome, for they had felt her sting, and feared that serpent tongue of slander, whose ancestral venom is derived from the arch reptile that lurked in the bowers of Eden. Woe to the slanderer!--To use the language of the wise man, "her end is bitter as wormwood, and sharp as a two-edged sword--Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell!" THE SHAKER GIRL.