As we have said, Mrs. Burton Hayley was using her tongue with great volubility at the moment of her introduction to the attention of the reader, though really the mode in which her single auditor kept her head buried in the pillow and drew the soft folds around her ears with both hands, did not indicate that desire for steady conversation which could have made such a continual verbal clatter a thing of necessity. There is the more occasion for giving Mrs. Burton Hayley her full opportunity for speech, as she has occasion to utter but little hereafter, in this connection. "You should be very thankful, my child, for all that has occurred," the voluble woman was saying. "A Power higher than ourselves overrules all these affairs much better than we could do; and it is flying in the face of Providence to cry and go on over little disappointments." A pause of one instant, and one instant only, as if in expectation that some reply would be vouchsafed; and then the band was again thrown upon the driving-wheel--as one of the machinery-tenders in a factory might say,--and the human buzz-saw whirled once more. "I have told you, child, time and again, that you would be punished for setting your affections on any person who had not given evidence of a changed heart--a man who had not passed from death unto life, but who still ran after the pomps and vanities of the world--those pomps and vanities which religion teaches us to despise and put away from us." (Oh, Mrs. Burton Hayley, why did you not catch a glance, at that moment, of the room in which you were sitting, redolent of every luxury within the reach of any ordinary wealth, and of your own stately and still comely person, arrayed in garments the least possible like those with which people content themselves who have really eschewed the "pomps and vanities of the world," either from conscientious humility or that other and much commoner motive--the lack of means to continue them!) "You should be very glad that you have been providentially delivered from your engagement with an unbeliever and a man of the world--a man without principle, I dare say, as you have discovered that he is without courage; and all the money there is in his family (and they _do_ say that the Brands have not much and never have had much!)--all their money, I say, acquired in the disreputable practice of the law, so that if this thing had not happened and you had been left to depend for subsistence upon his fortune, you might have found it all melting away in a moment, as money dishonestly acquired is certain to do; for does not the blessed book that I try to make my rule of life, say, my child, that moth is certain to corrupt and thieves break through and steal whatever has been wrung from the widow and the orphan?"