Accused, and forced by her sisters along with the child before the curate, his attention to their representation, his crimson face, knit brow, and thundering voice, struck with terror her very soul: innocence is not always a protection against fear--sometimes less bold than guilt. In her father and sisters she saw, she knew the suspicions, partial, cruel, boisterous natures by whom she was to be judged; and timid, gentle, oppressed, she fell trembling on her knees, and could only articulate, "Forgive me." The curate would not listen to this supplication till she had replied to this question, "Whose child is this?" She replied, "I do not know." Questioned louder, and with more violence still, "how the child came there, wherefore her affection for it, and whose it was," she felt the improbability of the truth still more forcibly than before, and dreaded some immediate peril from her father's rage, should she dare to relate an apparent lie. She paused to think upon a more probable tale than the real one; and as she hesitated, shook in every limb--while her father exclaimed, "I understand the cause of this terror; it confirms your sisters' fears, and your own shame. From your infancy I have predicted that some fatal catastrophe would befall you. I never loved you like my other children--I never had the cause: you were always unlike the rest--and I knew your fate would be calamitous; but the very worst of my forebodings did not come to this--so young, so guilty, and so artful! Tell me this instant, are you married?" Rebecca answered, "No." The sisters lifted up their hands! The father continued--"Vile creature, I thought as much. Still I will know the father of this child." She cast up her eyes to Heaven, and firmly vowed she "did not know herself--nor who the mother was." "This is not to be borne!" exclaimed the curate in fury. "Persist in this, and you shall never see my face again. Both your child and you I'll turn out of my house instantly, unless you confess your crime, and own the father." Curious to know this secret, the sisters went up to Rebecca with seeming kindness, and "conjured her to spare her father still greater grief, and her own and her child's public infamy, by acknowledging herself its mother, and naming the man who had undone her." Emboldened by this insult from her own sex, Rebecca now began to declare the simple truth. But no sooner had she said that "the child was presented to her care by a young man who had found it," than her sisters burst into laughter, and her father into redoubled rage. Once more the women offered their advice--"to confess and be forgiven." Once more the father raved.