timony--testimony so important to the life and the honor of one
person, because others might suffer in consequence--those others the
real criminals, and he the innocent victim? and loving him as she did,
and hating or fearing his enemies? Had she performed her duty in
suffering his case to go to judgment? and such a judgment--so horrible a
doom! Should she now suffer it to go to its dreadful execution, when a
word from her would stay the hand of the officer, and save the life of
the condemned? But would such be its effect? What credence would be
given now to one who, in the hall of justice, had sunk down like a
criminal herself--withholding the truth, and contradicting every word of
her utterance? To whom, then, could she apply? who would hear her plea,
even though she boldly narrated all the truth, in behalf of the
prisoner? She maddened as she thought on all these difficulties; her
blood grew fevered, a thick haze overspread her senses, and she raved at
last in the most wild delirium.

Some days went by in her unconsciousness, and when she at length grew
calm--when the fever of her mind had somewhat subsided--she opened her
eyes and found, to her great surprise, her uncle sitting beside her
couch. It was midnight; and this was the hour he had usually chosen when
making his visits to his family. In these stolen moments, his attendance
was chiefly given to that hapless orphan, whose present sufferings he
well knew were in great part attributable to himself.

The thought smote him, for, in reference to her, all feeling had not yet
departed from his soul. There was still a lurking sensibility--a
lingering weakness of humanity--one of those pledges which nature gives
of her old affiliation, and which she never entirely takes away from the
human heart. There are still some strings, feeble and wanting in energy
though they be, which bind even the most reckless outcast in some little
particular to humanity; and, however time, and the world's variety of
circumstance, may have worn them and impaired their firm hold, they
still sometimes, at unlooked-for hours, regrapple the long-rebellious
subject, and make themselves felt and understood as in the first moments
of their creation.

Such now was their resumed sway with Munro. While his niece--the young,
the beautiful, the virtuous--so endowed by nature--so improved by
education--so full of those fine graces, beyond the reach of any
art--lay before him insensible--her fine mind