“Oh, uncle! you can never know what a fearful trial I have passed through.  Affection!  It was, instead, an intense repugnance.  But, for my mother’s sake, I was prepared to make any sacrifice consistent with honour.”

“Of all others, my dear child,” said Mr. Ellis, with much feeling, “a sacrifice of this kind is the worst.  It is full of evil consequences that cannot be enumerated, and scarcely imagined.  You had no affection for this man, and yet, in the sight of Heaven, you were going solemnly to vow that you would love and cherish him through life!”

A shudder ran through the frame of Miriam, which being perceived by Mr. Ellis, he said—­

“Well may you shudder, as you stand looking down the awful abyss into which you were about plunging.  You can see no bottom, and you would have found none.  There is no condition in this life, Miriam, so intensely wretched as that of a pure-minded, true-hearted woman united to a man whom she not only cannot love, but from whom every instinct of her better nature turns with disgust.  And this would have been your condition.  Ah me! in what a fearful evil was this error of your mother, in opening a boarding-house, about involving her child!  I begged her not to do so.  I tried to show her the folly of such a step.  But she would not hear me.  And now she is in great trouble?”

“Oh yes, uncle.  All the money she had when she began is spent; and what she now receives from boarders but little more than half pays expenses.”

“I knew it would be so.  But my word was not regarded.  Your mother is no more fitted to keep a boarding-house than a child ten years old.  It takes a woman who has been raised in a different school, who has different habits, and a different character.”

“But what can we do, uncle?” said Miriam.

“What are you willing to do?”

“I am willing to do any thing that is right for me to do.”

“All employment, Miriam, are honourable so far as they are useful,” said Mr. Ellis, seriously, “though false pride tries to make us think differently.  And, strangely enough, this false pride drives too many, in the choice of employments, to the hardest, least honourable, and least profitable. hundreds of women resort to keeping boarders as a means of supporting their families when they might do it more easily, with less exposure and greater certainty, in teaching, if qualified, fine needle-work, or even in the keeping of a store for the sale of fancy and useful articles.  But pursuits of the latter kind they reject as too far below them, and, in vainly attempting to keep up a certain appearance, exhaust what little means they have.  A breaking up of the family, and a separation of its members, follow the error in too many cases.”

Miriam listened to this in silence.  Her uncle paused.

“What can I do to aid my mother?” the young girl asked.

“Could you not give music lessons?”