With Maria, the present hangs dark and the
future brightens. She thinks of the absent one she loves--of how she can
best serve her aged father, and how she can make their little home
cheerful until the return of Tom Swiggs, who is gone abroad. It must be
here disclosed that the old man had joined their hands, and invoked a
blessing on their heads, ere Tom took his departure. Maria looks forward
to the day of his return with joyous emotions. That return is the day
dream of her heart; in it she sees her future brightening. Such are the
cherished thoughts of a pure mind. Poverty may gnaw away at the
hearthstone, cares and sorrow may fall thick in your path, the rich may
frown upon you, and the vicious sport with your misfortunes, but virtue
gives you power to overcome them all. In Maria's ear something whispers:
Woman! hold fast to thy virtue, for if once it go neither gold nor false
tongues can buy it back.

Anna sees the companion of her early life, and the sharer of her
sufferings, shut up in a prison, a robber, doomed to the lash. "He was
sincere to me, and my only true friend--am I the cause of this?" she
muses. Her heart answers, and her bosom fills with dark and stormy
emotions. One small boon is now all she asks. She could bow down and
worship before the throne of virgin innocence, for now its worth towers,
majestic, before her. It discovers to her the falsity of her day-dream;
it tells her what an empty vessel is this life of ours without it. She
knows George Mullholland loves her passionately; she knows how deep will
be his grief, how revengeful his feelings. It is poverty that fastens
the poison in the heart of the rejected lover. The thought of this
flashes through her mind. His hopeless condition, crushed out as it were
to gratify him in whose company her pleasures are but transitory, and
may any day end, darkens as she contemplates it. How can she acquit her
conscience of having deliberately and faithlessly renounced one who was
so true to her? She repines, her womanly nature revolts at the
thought--the destiny her superstition pictured so dark and terrible,
stares her in the face. She resolves a plan for his release, and,
relieved with a hope that she can accomplish it while propitiating the
friendship of the Judge, the next day seeks him in his prison cell, and
with all that vehemence woman, in the outpouring of her generous
impulses, can call to her aid, implores his forgiveness. But the rust of
disappoin