Miriam, with a
blanching face.

"Too true, my dear child! too true! He is one of the worst of men.
Thank God that you have escaped the snare of the fowler!"

"Yes, thank God! thank God!" came trembling from the lips of the maiden.

Mr. Ellis then drew his niece to a part of the cabin where they could
converse without being overheard by other passengers on board of the
boat. To his inquiry into the reasons for so rash an act, Miriam gave
her uncle an undisguised account of her mother's distressed condition,
and touchingly portrayed the anguish of mind which had accompanied her
reluctant assent to the offer of Burton.

"And all this great sacrifice was on your mother's account?" said Mr.
Ellis.

"All! all! He agreed to settle upon her the sum of two thousand dollars
a year, if I would become his wife. This would have made the family
comfortable."

"And you most wretched. Better, a thousand times better, have gone down
to your grave, Miriam, than become the wife of that man. But for the
providential circumstance of my seeing you in the carriage with him,
all would have been lost. Surely, you could not have felt for him the
least affection."

"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