cease its bleeding, &c.

The history of all this poor maniac's sufferings is told in a few simple
words that fall incautiously from Mr. Glentworthy's lips: "Poor fool,
she had only been married a couple of weeks, when they sold her husband
down South. She thinks if she keeps mad, he'll come back."

There was something touching, something melancholy in the music of her
song, as its strains verberated and reverberated through the dread
vault, then, like the echo of a lover's lute on some Alpine hill, died
softly away.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

IN WHICH THERE IS A SINGULAR REVELATION.

Madame Montford returns, unsuccessful, to her parlor. It is conscience
that unlocks the guilty heart, that forces mortals to seek relief where
there is no chance of finding it. It was this irresistible emotion that
found her counseling Tom Swiggs, making of him a confidant in her search
for the woman she felt could remove the doubt, in respect to Anna's
identity, that hung so painfully in her mind. And yet, such was her
position, hesitating as it were between her ambition to move in
fashionable society, and her anxiety to atone for a past error, that she
dare not disclose the secret of all her troubles even to him. She sought
him, not that he could soften her anxiety, but that being an humble
person, she could pursue her object through him, unobserved to
society--in a word, that he would be a protection against the
apprehensions of scandal-mongers. Such are the shifts to which the
ambitious guilty have recourse. What she has beheld in the poor-house,
too, only serves to quicken her thoughts of the misery she may have
inflicted upon others, and to stimulate her resolution to persevere in
her search for the woman. Conscious that wealth and luxury does not
always bring happiness, and that without a spotless character, woman is
but a feeble creature in this world, she would now sacrifice everything
else for that one ennobling charm.

It may be proper here to add, that although Tom Swiggs could not enter
into the repentant woman's designs, having arranged with his employer to
sail for London in a few days, she learned of him something that
reflected a little more light in her path. And that was, that the woman
Anna Bonard, repined of her act in leaving George Mullholland, to whom
she was anxious to return--that she was now held against her will; that
she detested Judge Sleepyhorn, although he had provided lavishly for her
comfort. Anna kn