Cries, entreaties, and explanations, are all useless with such men as our guard is composed of.  Her clothes are torn, and she is found rioting in disreputable company.  The sergeant of the guard says, “Being thus disagreeably caught, she must abide the penalty.  It may teach you how to model your morals,” he adds; and straightway, at midnight, she is dragged to the guard-house, and in spite of her entreaties, locked up in a cell with the outcast women.  “Will you not hear me? will you not allow an innocent woman to speak in her own behalf?  Do, I beg, I beseech, I implore you-listen but for a minute-render me justice, and save me from this last step of shame and disgrace,” she appeals to the sergeant, as the cell door closes upon her.

Mr. Sergeant Stubble, for such is his name, shakes his head in doubt.  “Always just so,” he says, with a shrug of the shoulders:  “every one’s innocent what comes here ’specially women of your sort.  The worst rioters ’come the greatest sentimentalists, and repents most when they gets locked up-does!  You’ll find it a righteous place for reflection, in there.”  Mr. Sergeant Stubble shuts the door, and smothers her cries.

CHAPTER XLVI.

The soul may gain strength in A dreary cell.

It is Bulwer, the prince of modern novelists, who says:  “There is in calumny a rank poison that, even when the character throws off the slander, the heart remains diseased beneath the effect.”  And this is the exact condition in which Maria finds herself.  The knaves who have sought her ruin would seem to have triumphed; the ears of the charitable are closed to her; her judgment seems sealed.  And yet when all is dark and still; when her companions sleep in undisturbed tranquillity; when her agitated feelings become calmed; when there seems speaking to her, through the hushed air of midnight, the voice of a merciful providence-her soul quickens, and she counsels her self-command, which has not yet deserted her.  Woman’s nature is indeed strung in delicate threads, but her power of endurance not unfrequently puts the sterner sex to the blush.  “Slander has truly left my heart diseased, but I am innocent, and to-morrow, perhaps, my star will brighten.  These dark struggles cannot last forever!” she muses, as her self-command strengthens, and gives her new hopes.  Her betrothed may return to-morrow, and his generous nature will not refuse her an opportunity to assert her innocence.

And while she thus muses in the cell of the guard-house, the steamer in which Tom proceeds to Charleston is dashing through the waves, speeding on, like a thing of life, leaving a long train of phosphoric brine behind her.  As might naturally have been expected, Tom learns from a fellow-passenger all that has befallen the old Antiquary.  This filled his mind with gloomy forebodings concerning the fate of Maria.