“Are you, then, my mother?” inerrupts Anna, with a look of scorn.

“That I would answer if I could.  You have occupied my thoughts day and night.  I have traced your history up to a certain period. ("What I know of my own, I would fain not contemplate,” interrupts Anna.) Beyond that, all is darkness.  And yet there are circumstances that go far to prove you the child I seek.  Last night I dreamed I saw a gate leading to a dungeon, that into the dungeon I was impelled against my will.  While there I was haunted with the figure of a woman of the name of Mag Munday-a maniac, and in chains!  My heart bled at the sight, for she, I thought, was the woman in whose charge I left the child I seek.  I spoke-I asked her what had become of the child!  She pointed with her finger, told me to go seek you here, and vanished as I awoke.  I spent the day in unrest, went to the ball to-night, but found no pleasure in its gay circle.  Goaded in my conscience, I left the ball-room, and with the aid of a confidant am here.”

“I recognize-yes, my lady, I recognize you!  You think me your abandoned child, and yet you are too much the slave of society to seek me as a mother ought to do.  I am the supposed victim of your crime; you are the favored and flattered ornament of society.  Our likenesses have been compared many times:-I am glad we have met.  Go, woman, go!  I would not, outcast as I am, deign to acknowledge the mother who could enjoy the luxuries of life and see her child a wretch.”

“Woman! do not upbraid me.  Spare, oh! spare my troubled heart this last pang,” (she grasps convulsively at Anna’s hand, then shrinks back in fright.) “Tell me! oh, tell me!” she pursues, the tears coursing down her cheeks—­

Anna Bonard interrupts by saying, peremptorily, she has nothing to tell one so guilty.  To be thus rebuked by an abandoned woman, notwithstanding she might be her own child, wounded her feelings deeply.  It was like poison drying up her very blood.  Tormented with the thought of her error, (for she evidently labored under the smart of an error in early life,) her very existence now seemed a burden to her.  Gloomy and motionless she stood, as if hesitating how best to make her escape.

“Woman!  I will not betray your coming here.  But you cannot give me back my virtue; you cannot restore me untainted to the world-the world never forgives a fallen woman.  Her own sex will be first to lacerate her heart with her shame.”  These words were spoken with such biting sarcasm, that the Judge, whose nap the loudness of Anna’s voice had disturbed, protruded his flushed face and snowy locks from out the curtains of the alcove.  “The gay Madame Montford, as I am a Christian,” he exclaims in the eagerness of the moment, and the strange figure vanishes out of the door.

“A fashionable, but very mysterious sort of person,” pursues the Judge, confusedly.  “Ah! ha,—­her case, like many others, is the want of a clear conscience.  Snivel has it in hand.  A great knave, but a capital lawyer, that Snivel—­”