d come to her before in the hour of danger, perhaps he
would pity her, if he knew of her being locked up there in loneliness
and darkness.

Several times she heard sleighs driving along, the bells ringing merrily
and loud, and she thought they were going to stop--but they flew swiftly
by. She felt as the mariner feels on a desert island, when he spies a
distant sail, and tries in vain to arrest the vessel, that glides on,
unheeding his signal of distress.

"I will say my prayers," she said, "if I have no bed to lie down on. If
God ever heard me, He will listen now, for I've nobody but Him to go
to."

Kneeling down in the darkness, and folding her hands reverently, while
she lifted them upwards, she softly repeated the prayer her mother had
taught her, and, for the first time, the spirit of it entered her
understanding. When she came to the words--"Give us this day our daily
bread," she paused. "Thou hast given it," she added, "and oh! God, I
thank Thee." When she repeated--"Forgive my sins," she thought of the
sin, for which she was suffering so dreadful a punishment. She had
sinned in disobeying so kind a teacher. She ought to study, instead of
thinking of far-off things. She did not wonder the master was angry with
her. It was her own fault, for he had told her what he was going to do
with her; and if she had not been idle, she might have been at home by a
warm fire, safe in a father's sheltering arms. For the first time she
added something original and spontaneous to the ritual she had learned.
When she had finished the beautiful and sublime doxology, she bowed her
head still lower, and repeated, in accents trembling with penitence and
humility--

"Only take care of me to-night, our Father who art in heaven, and I will
try and sin no more."

Was she indeed left forgotten there, till morning's dawn?

When Master Hightower bent his steps homeward, he was solving a
peripatetic problem of Euclid. When he arrived at his lodgings, seated
himself by the blazing fire, and stretched out his massy limbs to meet
the genial heat, in the luxurious comfort he enjoyed, the cares, the
bustle, the events of the day were forgotten. A smoking supper made him
still more luxuriously comfortable, and a deeper oblivion stole over
him. It was not likely that the fragrant cigar he then lighted as the
crowning blessing of the evening, would recall to his mind the fireless,
supperless, comfortless culprit he had left in such "durance vi