ment when I pressed thee to my bosom."

She knelt down and embraced him again and again, while the joy that
could find no words expressed itself in broken accents, like the
bubbles gushing up to vanish at the surface of a deep fountain. The
sorrows of past years and the darker peril that was nigh cast not a
shadow on the brightness of that fleeting moment. Soon, however, the
spectators saw a change upon her face as the consciousness of her sad
estate returned, and grief supplied the fount of tears which joy had
opened. By the words she uttered it would seem that the indulgence of
natural love had given her mind a momentary sense of its errors, and
made her know how far she had strayed from duty in following the
dictates of a wild fanaticism.

"In a doleful hour art thou returned to me, poor boy," she said, "for
thy mother's path has gone darkening onward, till now the end is
death. Son, son, I have borne thee in my arms when my limbs were
tottering, and I have fed thee with the food that I was fainting for;
yet I have ill-performed a mother's part by thee in life, and now I
leave thee no inheritance but woe and shame. Thou wilt go seeking
through the world, and find all hearts closed against thee and their
sweet affections turned to bitterness for my sake. My child, my child,
how many a pang awaits thy gentle spirit, and I the cause of all!"

She hid her face on Ilbrahim's head, and her long raven hair,
discolored with the ashes of her mourning, fell down about him like a
veil. A low and interrupted moan was the voice of her heart's anguish,
and it did not fail to move the sympathies of many who mistook their
involuntary virtue for a sin. Sobs were audible in the female section
of the house, and every man who was a father drew his hand across his
eyes.

Tobias Pearson was agitated and uneasy, but a certain feeling like the
consciousness of guilt oppressed him; so that he could not go forth
and offer himself as the protector of the child. Dorothy, however, had
watched her husband's eye. Her mind was free from the influence that
had begun to work on his, and she drew near the Quaker woman and
addressed her in the hearing of all the congregation.

"Stranger, trust this boy to me, and I will be his mother," she said,
taking Ilbrahim's hand. "Providence has signally marked out my husband
to protect him, and he has fed at our table and lodged under our roof
now many days, till our hearts have grown very strongly unto him