“My conscience rebuked me,” she resumes, as if indifferent about answering the question, “for I loved the child as my own; and the friend I lived with, and who followed the sea, printed on its right arm two hearts and a broken anchor, which remain there now.  My husband died of the cholera, and the friend I had taken to, and who treated me kindly, also died, and I soon found myself an abandoned woman, an outcast-yes, ruined forever, and in the streets, leading a life that my own feelings revolted at, but from which starvation only seemed the alternative.  My conscience rebuked me again and again, and something—­I cannot tell what it was—­impelled me with an irresistible force to watch over the fortunes of the child I knew must come to the same degraded life necessity-perhaps it was my own false step-had forced upon me.  I watched her a child running neglected about the streets, then I saw her sold to Hag Zogbaum, who lived in Pell street; I never lost sight of her-no, I never lost sight of her, but fear of criminating myself kept me from making myself known to her.  When I had got old in vice, and years had gone past, and she was on the first step to the vice she had been educated to, we shared the same roof.  Then she was known as Anna Bonard—­”

“Anna Bonard!” exclaims Madame Montford.  “Then truly it is she who now lives in Charleston!  There is no longer a doubt.  I may seek and claim her, and return her to at least a life of comfort.”

“There you will find her.  Ah, many times have I looked upon her, and thought if I could only save her, how happy I could die.  I shared the same roof with her in Charleston, and when I got sick she was kind to me, and watched over me, and was full of gentleness, and wept over her condition.  She has sighed many a time, and said how she wished she knew how she came into the world, to be forced to live despised by the world.  But I got down, down, down, from one step to another, one step to another, as I had gone up from one step to another in the splendor of vice, until I found myself, tortured in mind and body, a poor neglected wretch in the Charleston Poor-house.  In it I was treated worse than a slave, left, sick and heart-broken, and uncared-for, to the preying of a fever that destroyed my mind.  And as if that were not enough, I was carried into the dungeons-the ’mad cells,’-and chained.  And this struck such a feeling of terror into my soul that my reason, as they said, was gone forever.  But I got word to Anna, and she came to me, and gave me clothes and many little things to comfort me, and got me out, and gave me money to get back to New York, where I have been ever since, haunted from place to place, with scarce a place to lay my head.  Surely I have suffered.  Shall I be forgiven?” Her voice here falters, she becomes weak, and seems sinking under the burden of her emotions.  “If,—­if-if,” she mutters, incoherently, “you can save me, and forgive me, you will have the prayers of one who has drank deep of the bitter cup.”  She looks up with a sad, melancholy countenance, again implores forgiveness, and bursts into loud sobs.