trap me, with her wheedling ways, into letting
out something about Mr. Carr's having written, and my having burned
his letters. It was at this time also, and a little before it, that I
noticed the alteration in her dress. She fell into wearing her things in
a slovenly way, and sitting at home in her shawl, on account of feeling
cold, she said, when I reprimanded her for such untidyness.

"I don't know how long things might have lasted like this, or what the
end might have been, if events had gone on in their own way. But
the dreadful truth made itself known at last suddenly, by a sort of
accident. She had a quarrel with one of the other young women in the
dressmaking-room, named Ellen Gough, about a certain disreputable
friend of hers, one Jane Holdsworth, whom I had once employed, and had
dismissed for impertinence and slatternly conduct. Ellen Gough having,
it seems, been provoked past all bearing by something my niece said
to her, came away to me in a passion, and in so many words told me the
awful truth, that my brother's only daughter had disgraced herself and
her family for ever. The horror and misery of that moment is present to
me now, at this distance of time. The shock I then received struck me
down at once; I never have recovered from it, and I never shall.

"In the first distraction of the moment, I must have done or said
something down stairs, where I was, which must have warned the wretch in
the room above that I had discovered her infamy. I remember going to her
bed-chamber, and finding the door locked, and hearing her refuse to open
it. After that, I must have fainted, for I found myself, I did not know
how, in the work-room, and Ellen Gough giving me a bottle to smell to.
With her help, I got into my own room; and there I fainted away dead
again.

"When I came to, I went once more to my niece's bed-chamber. The door
was now open; and there was a bit of paper on the looking-glass directed
to my brother Joshua. She was gone from the honest house that her sin
had defiled--gone from it for ever. She had written only a few scrawled
wild lines to her father, but in them there was full acknowledgment of
her crime and a confession that it was the villain Carr who had caused
her to commit it. She said she was gone to take her shame from our
doors. She entreated that no attempt might be made to trace her, for she
would die rather than return to disgrace her family, and her father
in his old age. After this came