ded from no house she had
heart to visit--no coarse comment, no ribald jest accompanied the notice
people took of her baby--no licentious rustic presumed on her frailty;
for the pale, melancholy face of the nursing mother, weeping as she sung
the lullaby, forbade all such approach--and an universal sentiment of
indignation drove from the parish the heartless and unprincipled
seducer--if all had been known, too weak word for his crime--who left
thus to pine in sorrow, and in shame far worse than sorrow, one who till
her unhappy fall had been held up by every mother as an example to her
daughters.

Never had she striven to cease to love her betrayer--but she had
striven--and an appeased conscience had enabled her to do so--to think
not of him now that he had deserted her for ever. Sometimes his image,
as well in love as in wrath, passed before the eye of her heart--but she
closed it in tears of blood, and the phantom disappeared. Thus all the
love towards him that slept--but was not dead--arose in yearnings of
still more exceeding love towards his child. Round its head was gathered
all hope of comfort--of peace--of reward of her repentance. One of its
smiles was enough to brighten up the darkness of a whole day. In her
breast--on her knee--in its cradle, she regarded it with a perpetual
prayer. And this feeling it was, with all the overwhelming tenderness of
affection, all the invigorating power of passion, that, under the hand
of God, bore her up and down that fearful mountain's brow, and after the
hour of rescue and deliverance, stretched her on the greensward like a
corpse.

The rumour of the miracle circled the mountain's base, and a strange
story without names had been told to the Wood-ranger of the
Cairn-Forest, by a wayfaring man. Anxious to know what truth there was
in it, he crossed the hill, and making his way through the sullen crowd,
went up to the eminence, and beheld her whom he had so wickedly ruined,
and so basely deserted. Hisses, and groans, and hootings, and fierce
eyes, and clenched hands assailed and threatened him on every side.

His heart died within him, not in fear, but in remorse. What a worm he
felt himself to be! And fain would he have become a worm, that, to
escape all that united human scorn, he might have wriggled away in slime
into some hole of the earth. But the meek eye of Hannah met his in
forgiveness--an un-upbraiding tear--a faint smile of love. All his
better nature rose within him