“Dear Cecilia,” answered Mary, “it is not because Sally Bishop has been a very bad woman that I avoid her. But she was long ago the willing and exulting means of proving to me not only her own viciousness, but the foul treachery and utterly coarse, detestable baseness of heart and mind of one I trusted as I now trust only God. It was right that I should know the truth, but I must feel a personal horror of a woman whose ill-omened duty it was to tell me to despair and lose my faith and my happiness together. And Sally Bishop did her duty as if it were a privilege and beheld my misery with vile, vulgar, shameless triumph. I abhor the thought of her.” Cecilia said nothing more at the time--indeed, there was nothing she could say. But as the days passed, Sally Bishop grew hopelessly worse, and her father kept himself boozy all the while. Horse-jockeys, pro-slavery judges, gamblers, and collectors of democratic customs sometimes love their families. Miss Sullivan had just received Clara’s summons to Diana’s bed of death; she was preparing to go that evening, when Mrs. Tootler drove up in haste. “Sally Bishop cannot live through the day,” said the lady. “She demands to see you. She has a confession to make. Coming death has absolved her from a pledge of wicked secrecy.” And so, by the deathbed, Miss Sullivan, whose best and brightest hopes had been destroyed by the infamy of this poor, dying wretch, listened to her confession and pitied and pardoned her. Sally Bishop, vain and immodest, had nursed in her heart against young Ira Waddy the bitter spite of a shameless woman scorned. Belden, who was her first instructor in shamelessness, discovered this, and used his power to delude her into the joint revenge of the letters. Oh, what carefully villainous letters Belden made of them! how brutally treacherous! how vile! Sally Bishop took the correspondence in Ira Waddy’s writing to Miss Janeway. “There,” said she, “you heiress, you great lady, that have stolen away my lover, because you are rich, and are engaged to him without your father’s knowledge, see what letters he used to write to me and how he spoke of you and his interviews with you. He ruined me because I loved him, and made of me what you see in my own letters, and I was willing that he should marry you because he always promised that I should be first. But now he is trying to get rid of me. He finds me in the way.” Miss Janeway read the letters as one reads a fascinating tale of horror. There could be no doubt of them; hand, style, circumstances--it was inevitable they were his. Poor, innocent girl--she would afterward see the world and its treacheries, but never any so base as this. Her lover, with her maiden kiss upon his lips--agony! to leave her and write this.