herself from the sense of
suffocation which oppressed her, Sarah had remained for some time
plunged in bitter reflections, almost amounting to regrets, that she had
been permitted to escape from almost certain death.

Suddenly the door of the invalid's chamber opened, and Thomas Seyton
entered, evidently struggling to restrain some powerful emotion. Hastily
waving his hand for the countess's attendants to retire, he approached
his sister, who seemed scarcely to perceive her brother's presence.

"How are you now?" inquired he.

"Much the same; I feel very weak, and have at times a most painful
sensation of being suffocated. Why was I not permitted to quit this
world during my late attack?"

"Sarah," replied Thomas Seyton, after a momentary silence, "you are
hovering between life and death,--any violent emotion might destroy you
or recall your feeble powers and restore you to health."

"There can be no further trial for me, brother!"

"You know not that--"

"I could now even hear that Rodolph were dead without a shock. The pale
spectre of my murdered child--murdered through my instrumentality, is
ever before me. It creates not mere emotion, but a bitter and ceaseless
remorse. Oh, brother, I have known the feelings of a mother only since I
have become childless."

"I own I liked better to find in you that cold, calculating ambition,
that made you regard your daughter but as a means of realising the dream
of your whole existence."

"That ambition fell to the ground, crushed for ever beneath the
overwhelming force of the prince's reproaches. And the picture drawn by
him of the horrors to which my child had been exposed awakened in my
breast all a mother's tenderness."

"And how," said Seyton, hesitatingly and laying deep emphasis on each
word he uttered, "if by a miracle, a chance, an almost impossibility,
your daughter were still living, tell me how you would support such a
discovery."

"I should expire of shame and despair!"

"No such thing! You would be but too delighted at the triumph such a
circumstance would afford to your ambition; for had your daughter
survived, the prince would, beyond a doubt, have married you."

"And admitting the miracle you speak of could happen, I should have no
right to live; but so soon as the prince had bestowed on me the title of
his consort, my duty would have been to deliver him from an unworthy
spouse, and my daughter from an unnatural mother."

The perplexity of Thoma