Surprise, astonishment, that bordered on distraction, seemed to have
suspended her faculties, till, waking by degrees to a keen sense of
anguish, a whirlwind of rage and indignation roused her torpid pulse. One
recollection with frightful velocity following another, threatened to
fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the terrific
inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial sounds of
whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, which
amuse while they affright; but such tones of misery as carry a dreadful
certainty directly to the heart. What effect must they then have produced
on one, true to the touch of sympathy, and tortured by maternal
apprehension!

Her infant's image was continually floating on Maria's sight, and the
first smile of intelligence remembered, as none but a mother, an unhappy
mother, can conceive. She heard her half speaking cooing, and felt the
little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom--a bosom bursting with the
nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain.
From a stranger she could indeed receive the maternal aliment, Maria was
grieved at the thought--but who would watch her with a mother's
tenderness, a mother's self-denial?

The retreating shadows of former sorrows rushed back in a gloomy train,
and seemed to be pictured on the walls of her prison, magnified by the
state of mind in which they were viewed--Still she mourned for her child,
lamented she was a daughter, and anticipated the aggravated ills of life
that her sex rendered almost inevitable, even while dreading she was no
more. To think that she was blotted out of existence was agony, when the
imagination had been long employed to expand her faculties; yet to
suppose her turned adrift on an unknown sea, was scarcely less
afflicting.

After being two days the prey of impetuous, varying emotions, Maria began
to reflect more calmly on her present situation, for she had actually
been rendered incapable of sober reflection, by the discovery of the act
of atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not have imagined,
that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot
could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected
blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or
misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had
hitherto meditated only to point the dart of anguish, and suppressed th