refinement of
cruelty, on the part of those who sent it, worthy of a Japanese.

Rafts had been launched and lost, the survivors stated (the men who had
seized the long-boat, to the exclusion of the women and children); the
sea had swallowed all the remainder. A later statement might refute the
first, but even then none could know the truth with regard to my
identity, for would not Basil Bainrothe control the publication as he
pleased, and make me dead if he listed--dead even after the rescue?

Yet Hope would sometimes whisper in her daring moods: "All this shall
pass away, and be as it had not been. Be of good heart, Miriam, and do
not let them kill you; live for Mabel--live for Wentworth!"

Then, with bowed head, and silent, streaming tears, my soul would climb
in prayer to the footstool of the Most High, and the grace, which had
never come to me before, fell over me like a mantle in this sad
extremity.

CHAPTER VI.

Unfaltering in her respectful demeanor toward me was Mrs. Clayton from
the time of the little scene I have recently described. What new and
sudden light had broken in upon her I never knew, but I supposed at the
time that the flash of conviction had gone home to her mind with regard
to the baseness of Bainrothe and the iniquity of his proceedings,
founded on the fear I had expressed of his solitary presence, and the
insight she had gained into my character.

Watching none the less strictly, she gradually relaxed that personal
surveillance that is ever so intolerable to the proud and
delicate-minded, and those suggestions that, however well intended, had
been so irritating to me from such a source. She no longer urged me to
read, or sew, or eat, or take exercise; but, retiring into her own work
(whence she could observe me at her pleasure, for her door was always
set wide open, and her face turned in my direction), she employed or
feigned to employ herself in her inexhaustible stocking-basket or
scollop-work, either one the last resource of idiocy, as it seemed to
me.

Left thus to myself in some degree, I unclosed the leaves of the
bookcase, and surveyed its grim array of "classics"--all new and
unmarked by any name, or sign of having been read--and from them I
selected a few worthies, through whose pages I delved drearily and
industriously, and most unprofitably it must be confessed. The only
living sensations I received from the contents of that bookcase were, I
am ashamed to acknowledge