"My Zorilda," answered Mrs. Gordon, "you have not reduced religion to practice, and your trials have been sufficient to render the task of obedience severe; but it must be learned. The morbid sensibility which you encourage blinds your understanding, and you draw false conclusions. The inference which _I_ derive from your dialogue with the stranger this morning is directly opposite to that which you deduce. The soldier's wife was not your mother. Nay, I should decide against her having even been your nurse. The strong instincts of nature are seldom violated, and amid all the depravity of human kind there are few instances of such unnatural character as you take for granted in the present case. Zorilda is not a name by which an English soldier's wife would have been likely to call her daughter; neither would a woman who sold her own child, and whose husband was no longer living to upbraid her, or seek its recovery, have had any apparent motive for the concealment which she desired, in the speedy decampment of the gipsies. Be assured that you are rather the offspring of Spanish parents, probably of rank and consideration. Silk and velvet, of which materials your dress was made when first my sister saw you, are not the common manufactures which clothe inferior people. Who has had the misfortune to lose you, is a mystery which I wish we were enabled to solve, but all that I _do_ know convinces me that you are not the child of her who sold you to the gipsey gang." "Dear and kind friend," exclaimed Zorilda, "how grateful am I for the tender feeling with which you try to mitigate my pain. I will not repel your efforts--I will adopt your creed--it shall be mine, and I will endeavour to believe that I was indeed stolen from my home by the cruel being who passed me again into stranger hands. But what a fate is mine, when such a surmise is the best consolation which can be offered. Had I been left in my native land, though torn from all I loved, I might have been brought up in the religion of my ancestors, and found an asylum in some friendly convent. You have no such refuge here for the unhappy." "All England is the refuge of the destitute," replied Mrs. Gordon; "her bounteous shores have been pressed by royal fugitives, and this glorious land, this favoured soil, has sheltered kings as well as slaves from the tyranny of other climes. Shall my Zoé repine at having imbibed the doctrines of a purer faith than that of Spain? The heart may freely dedicate itself to God without the call of matin or of vesper bell. We have altars every where, and do not want the convent's gloomy pile to enshrine our prayers. Those sad receptacles are frequently the scene of guilt, and the prison walls of the religious recluse, too often contain devotion of every kind but that to Heaven."