he started and would have arisen.

"Let me flee! Let me flee and hide myself, that they may not look upon
me!" she cried. But, with returning recollection, she hushed herself
and was still as death, for it seemed as if other voices, familiar in
infancy and unforgotten through many wanderings and in all the
vicissitudes of her heart and fortune, were mingling with the accents
of the prayer. At first the words were faint and indistinct--not
rendered so by distance, but rather resembling the dim pages of a book
which we strive to read by an imperfect and gradually brightening
light. In such a manner, as the prayer proceeded, did those voices
strengthen upon the ear, till at length the petition ended, and the
conversation of an aged man and of a woman broken and decayed like
himself became distinctly audible to the lady as she knelt. But those
strangers appeared not to stand in the hollow depth between the three
hills. Their voices were encompassed and re-echoed by the walls of a
chamber the windows of which were rattling in the breeze; the regular
vibration of a clock, the crackling of a fire and the tinkling of the
embers as they fell among the ashes rendered the scene almost as vivid
as if painted to the eye. By a melancholy hearth sat these two old
people, the man calmly despondent, the woman querulous and tearful,
and their words were all of sorrow. They spoke of a daughter, a
wanderer they knew not where, bearing dishonor along with her and
leaving shame and affliction to bring their gray heads to the grave.
They alluded also to other and more recent woe, but in the midst of
their talk their voices seemed to melt into the sound of the wind
sweeping mournfully among the autumn leaves; and when the lady lifted
her eyes, there was she kneeling in the hollow between three hills.

"A weary and lonesome time yonder old couple have of it," remarked the
old woman, smiling in the lady's face.

"And did you also hear them?" exclaimed she, a sense of intolerable
humiliation triumphing over her agony and fear.

"Yea, and we have yet more to hear," replied the old woman, "wherefore
cover thy face quickly."

Again the withered hag poured forth the monotonous words of a prayer
that was not meant to be acceptable in heaven, and soon in the pauses
of her breath strange murmurings began to thicken, gradually
increasing, so as to drown and overpower the charm by which they grew.
Shrieks pierced through the obscurity of sound and we