Mabel Marryott sat down--she had hitherto remained coldly standing--and signed to her daughter to do the same. The submissive manner Jane had assumed, probably in a degree mollifying her hardened spirit; or rather perhaps it was a sort of triumph, to see her virtuous child thus brought low before her. She had quite lived down any womanly or maternal feeling; and would probably, without the slightest compunction, have turned her from the door penniless as she came: yet something--perhaps the idea that it would be disagreeable and degrading to her high pretensions, to have that poor, shabby creature coming begging at the house as her daughter--made her calculate that it might be a better plan to get rid of her at once--easily as it was in her power now to accomplish it. Those notes still in her pocket, she had begun already to repent not having left them in their hiding place--bank notes were terrible things to meddle with, but at any rate no harm could come of their being put in use by one under Jane Marryott's circumstances. In short, it ended as we all know by those twice guilty papers being transferred into the hands of the innocent; and Jane Marryott--bound by the promise of strict secrecy, which she so resolutely maintained inviolate--left the house without any member of the household having been made aware of her identity, with the unblessed cause of fresh misfortune in her possession. With the unhappy sequel we are acquainted. * * * * * Six months had passed, and Mabel Marryott lay groaning on a bed of agony. The pains of hell truly had got hold of her, and conscience--faint foretaste of the never dying worm, rose up to torment her "before her time," with the dark catalogue of remembered sin--sin unrepented, and therefore unforgiven. She would not turn to the one sure fountain, open for sin and for uncleaness. She even repulsed all offers of spiritual ministration from those members of the household who had thought and feeling, to see the awful nature of the dying woman's position. "No, she wanted no clergymen, they could avail her nothing--could not undo one of the sins she had committed." But at length one day, she sent to desire Eugene Trevor would come himself and speak to her in private. He came, and lifting herself up with difficulty in her bed, she turned her ghastly countenance towards her foster-son as he stood by her side, and fixing her sunken eyes upon him, addressed him thus: "Eugene Trevor, my daughter is to be tried this week at ---- for forgery." "So I was sorry to hear, Mabel; but there seems, I think, every chance of her being acquitted."