For a moment the light, the mirrors, the roof itself swam round me, and I sank half-fainting in my mother's arms. "O! this is but a jest, a cruel jest to frighten me. Say, mother, it is a jest!" "It is not a jest; it is sober, serious earnest;" and she raised me sternly from her arms. "He has offered his hand, and you _will_ marry him." I flung myself on my knees at the bedside, clasped her hands, and as my night-dress fell back from my shoulders and bosom, I told her, with sobs and tears, of my love for Ernest, and my engagement with him. "Pshaw! A poor clergyman's son," she said bitterly. "O, let us leave this place, mother!" I cried, still pressing her hands to my bosom. "You say that we are poor. Be it so. We will find a home together in the home of my childhood. Or if that fails us, I will work for you. I will toil from sun to sun and all night long,--beg,--do anything rather than marry this man. For, mother, I cannot help it,--but I do hate him with all my soul." "Pretty talk, very pretty!" and she loosened her hands from my grasp; "but did you ever try poverty, my child? Did you ever know what the word meant,--POVERTY? Did you ever work sixteen hours a day, at your needle, for as many pennies, walk the streets at dead of winter in half-naked feet, and go for two long days and nights without a morsel of food? Did you ever try it, my child? That's the life which _poor_ widows and their pretty daughters live in New York, my dear." "But Ernest loves me,--he will make his way in life,--we will be married,--you will share our home, dear mother." These words rendered her perfectly furious. She started up and uttered a frightful oath--it was the first time I had ever heard an oath from a woman's lips. Her countenance for a moment was fiendish. She assailed me with a torrent of reproaches, concluding thus: "And this is your gratitude for the care, the anxiety, the very agony of a mother's anxiety, which I have endured on your account for years! In return for all you condemn me to--poverty! But it shall not be. One of us must bend, and that one will not be me. I swear, girl,"--her brows were knit, she was lividly pale, and she raised her right hand to heaven,--"that you _shall_ marry this man." "And I swear,"--I bounded to my feet, my bosom bare, and the blood boiling in my veins--perchance it was the same blood which gave my mother her fiery temper,--"I swear that I will _not_ marry him as long as there is life in me. Do you hear me, mother? Before I marry that miserable wretch, whose very presence fills me with loathing, I will fall a corpse at your feet." My words, my attitude took her by surprise. She surveyed me silently but was too much enraged to speak. "O, that my father was living!" I cried, the fit of passion succeeded by a burst of tears; "he would save me from this hideous marriage." My mother quietly drew a letter from her bosom and placed it open in my hand.