e resumed. "My dear
parents were exemplary people; I was most carefully brought up. Are you
pious? Let us hope so."

Emily was once more reminded of the past.

The bygone time returned to her memory--the time when she had accepted
Sir Jervis Redwood's offer of employment, and when Mrs. Rook had arrived
at the school to be her traveling companion to the North. The wretched
creature had entirely forgotten her own loose talk, after she had
drunk Miss Ladd's good wine to the last drop in the bottle. As she was
boasting now of her piety, so she had boasted then of her lost faith and
hope, and had mockingly declared her free-thinking opinions to be the
result of her ill-assorted marriage. Forgotten--all forgotten, in this
later time of pain and fear. Prostrate under the dread of death, her
innermost nature--stripped of the concealments of her later life--was
revealed to view. The early religious training, at which she had
scoffed in the insolence of health and strength, revealed its latent
influence--intermitted, but a living influence always from first to
last. Mrs. Rook was tenderly mindful of her exemplary parents, and proud
of exhibiting religion, on the bed from which she was never to rise
again.

"Did I tell you that I am a miserable sinner?" she asked, after an
interval of silence.

Emily could endure it no longer. "Say that to the clergyman," she
answered--"not to me."

"Oh, but I must say it," Mrs. Rook insisted. "I _am_ a miserable sinner.
Let me give you an instance of it," she continued, with a shameless
relish of the memory of her own frailties. "I have been a drinker, in
my time. Anything was welcome, when the fit was on me, as long as it got
into my head. Like other persons in liquor, I sometimes talked of things
that had better have been kept secret. We bore that in mind--my old man
and I---when we were engaged by Sir Jervis. Miss Redwood wanted to
put us in the next bedroom to hers--a risk not to be run. I might have
talked of the murder at the inn; and she might have heard me. Please to
remark a curious thing. Whatever else I might let out, when I was in my
cups, not a word about the pocketbook ever dropped from me. You will ask
how I know it. My dear, I should have heard of it from my husband, if I
had let _that_ out--and he is as much in the dark as you are. Wonderful
are the workings of the human mind, as the poet says; and drink drowns
care, as the proverb says. But can drink deliver a person from