d went in. She wandered from room to room
among the curiosities, hardly caring for anything she saw, till she
came to the exhibition-room, where plays were acted. She had never seen
a play performed, and she had looked forward with brilliant
anticipations to the pleasure of seeing one. She was disappointed, for
it had not entered into her calculation that a clean conscience is
necessary for the full enjoyment of anything. The actors and the
actresses strutted their brief hour before her; but to her the play was
incomprehensible and silly. It had no meaning, and even the funny
things which the low comedian said and did could not make her laugh.
Before the performance was half finished, she had enough of it, and
left the place in disgust.

Jenny Kent was rapturously happy, dying in a hovel, in the midst of
poverty and want, while she was miserable with health and strength,
with plenty to eat, drink, and wear. Fanny tried to shake off the
strange depression which had so suddenly come over her. She had never
been troubled with any such thoughts and feelings before. If she had
occasionally been sorry for her wrong acts, it was only a momentary
twinge, which hardly damped her spirits. She was weighed down to the
earth, and she could not rid herself of the burden that oppressed her.
She wanted to go into some dark corner and cry. She felt that it would
do her good to weep, and to suffer even more than she had yet been
called upon to endure.

"I'll bear your name to heaven with me," had been the words of the
dying girl to Fanny; but what a reproach her name would be to the pure
and good of the happy land! In some manner, not evident to our human
sight, or understood by our human minds, the words of Jenny had given
the wayward girl a full view of herself--had turned her thoughts in
upon the barrenness of her own heart. Her wrong acts, so trivial to her
before, were now magnified into mountains, and the crime she had
committed that morning was so monstrous and abominable that she
abhorred herself for it.

In spite of the reproaches which every loving word of the dying girl
hurled into the conscience of Fanny, there was a strange and
unaccountable fascination in the languid look of the sweet sufferer.
Wherever she turned, Jenny seemed to be looking at her with a glance
full of heaven, while the black waters of her own soul rose up to choke
her.

Fanny struggled to get rid of these strange thoughts, but she could
not; and she