usly determined to
speak mildly, "why then should I eat?"

"But, in spite of that, you must and shall eat something. I have had many
ladies under my care, who have resolved to starve themselves; but, soon
or late, they gave up their intent, as they recovered their senses."

"Do you really think me mad?" asked Maria, meeting the searching glance
of her eye.

"Not just now. But what does that prove?--only that you must be the more
carefully watched, for appearing at times so reasonable. You have not
touched a morsel since you entered the house."--Maria sighed
intelligibly.--"Could any thing but madness produce such a disgust for
food?"

"Yes, grief; you would not ask the question if you knew what it was." The
attendant shook her head; and a ghastly smile of desperate fortitude
served as a forcible reply, and made Maria pause, before she added--"Yet
I will take some refreshment: I mean not to die.--No; I will preserve my
senses; and convince even you, sooner than you are aware of, that my
intellects have never been disturbed, though the exertion of them may
have been suspended by some infernal drug."

Doubt gathered still thicker on the brow of her guard, as she attempted
to convict her of mistake.

"Have patience!" exclaimed Maria, with a solemnity that inspired awe. "My
God! how have I been schooled into the practice!" A suffocation of voice
betrayed the agonizing emotions she was labouring to keep down; and
conquering a qualm of disgust, she calmly endeavoured to eat enough to
prove her docility, perpetually turning to the suspicious female, whose
observation she courted, while she was making the bed and adjusting the
room.

"Come to me often," said Maria, with a tone of persuasion, in consequence
of a vague plan that she had hastily adopted, when, after surveying this
woman's form and features, she felt convinced that she had an
understanding above the common standard; "and believe me mad, till you
are obliged to acknowledge the contrary." The woman was no fool, that is,
she was superior to her class; nor had misery quite petrified the
life's-blood of humanity, to which reflections on our own misfortunes
only give a more orderly course. The manner, rather than the
expostulations, of Maria made a slight suspicion dart into her mind with
corresponding sympathy, which various other avocations, and the habit of
banishing compunction, prevented her, for the present, from examining
more minutely.

But when she was