“Get you down, woman, from the holy place which you profane,” he said, “Is it to the Lord’s house that you come to pour forth the foulness of your heart and the inspiration of the devil?  Get you down, and remember that the sentence of death is on you—­yea, and shall be executed, were it but for this day’s work.”

“I go, friend, I go, for the voice hath had its utterance,” replied she, in a depressed, and even mild, tone.  “I have done my mission unto thee and to thy people; reward me with stripes, imprisonment or death, as ye shall be permitted.”  The weakness of exhausted passion caused her steps to totter as she descended the pulpit stairs.

The people, in the mean while, were stirring to and fro on the floor of the house, whispering among themselves and glancing toward the intruder.  Many of them now recognized her as the woman who had assaulted the governor with frightful language as he passed by the window of her prison; they knew, also, that she was adjudged to suffer death, and had been preserved only by an involuntary banishment into the wilderness.  The new outrage by which she had provoked her fate seemed to render further lenity impossible, and a gentleman in military dress, with a stout man of inferior rank, drew toward the door of the meetinghouse and awaited her approach.  Scarcely did her feet press the floor, however, when an unexpected scene occurred.  In that moment of her peril, when every eye frowned with death, a little timid boy threw his arms round his mother.

“I am here, mother; it is I, and I will go with thee to prison,” he exclaimed.

She gazed at him with a doubtful and almost frightened expression, for she knew that the boy had been cast out to perish, and she had not hoped to see his face again.  She feared, perhaps, that it was but one of the happy visions with which her excited fancy had often deceived her in the solitude of the desert or in prison; but when she felt his hand warm within her own and heard his little eloquence of childish love, she began to know that she was yet a mother.

“Blessed art thou, my son!” she sobbed.  “My heart was withered—­yea, dead with thee and with thy father—­and now it leaps as in the first moment when I pressed thee to my bosom.”

She knelt down and embraced him again and again, while the joy that could find no words expressed itself in broken accents, like the bubbles gushing up to vanish at the surface of a deep fountain.  The sorrows of past years and the darker peril that was nigh cast not a shadow on the brightness of that fleeting moment.  Soon, however, the spectators saw a change upon her face as the consciousness of her sad estate returned, and grief supplied the fount of tears which joy had opened.  By the words she uttered it would seem that the indulgence of natural love had given her mind a momentary sense of its errors, and made her know how far she had strayed from duty in following the dictates of a wild fanaticism.