The wedding-day of Mr. William Norwynne with Miss Caroline Sedgeley arrived; and, on that day, the bells of every parish surrounding that in which they lived joined with their own, in celebration of the blissful union. Flowers were strewn before the new-married pair, and favours and ale made many a heart more gladsome than that of either bridegroom or bride.

Upon this day of ringing and rejoicing the bells were not muffled, nor was conversation on the subject withheld from the ear of Agnes! She heard like her neighbours; and sitting on the side of her bed in her little chamber, suffered, under the cottage roof, as much affliction as ever visited a palace.

Tyrants, who have embrued their hands in the blood of myriads of their fellow-creatures, can call their murders “religion, justice, attention to the good of mankind.” Poor Agnes knew no sophistry to calm her sense of guilt: she felt herself a harlot and a murderer; a slighted, a deserted wretch, bereft of all she loved in this world, all she could hope for in the next.

She complained bitterly of illness, nor could the entreaties of her father and mother prevail on her to share in the sports of this general holiday. As none of her humble visitors suspected the cause of her more than ordinary indisposition, they endeavoured to divert it with an account of everything they had seen at church—“what the bride wore; how joyful the bridegroom looked;”—and all the seeming signs of that complete happiness which they conceived was for certain tasted.

Agnes, who, before this event, had at moments suppressed the agonising sting of self-condemnation in the faint prospect of her lover one day restored, on this memorable occasion lost every glimpse of hope, and was weighed to the earth with an accumulation of despair.

Where is the degree in which the sinner stops? Unhappy Agnes! the first time you permitted indecorous familiarity from a man who made you no promise, who gave you no hope of becoming his wife, who professed nothing beyond those fervent, though slender, affections which attach the rake to the wanton; the first time you interpreted his kind looks and ardent prayers into tenderness and constancy; the first time you descended from the character of purity, you rushed imperceptibly on the blackest crimes. The more sincerely you loved, the more you plunged in danger: from one ungoverned passion proceeded a second and a third. In the fervency of affection you yielded up your virtue! In the excess of fear, you stained your conscience by the intended murder of your child! And now, in the violence of grief, you meditate—what?—to put an end to your existence by your own hand!

After casting her thoughts around, anxious to find some bud of comfort on which to fix her longing eye; she beheld, in the total loss of William, nothing but a wide waste, an extensive plain of anguish. “How am I to be sustained through this dreary journey of life?” she exclaimed. Upon this question she felt, more poignantly than ever, her loss of innocence: innocence would have been her support, but, in place of this best prop to the afflicted, guilt flashed on her memory every time she flew for aid to reflection.

At length, from horrible rumination, a momentary alleviation came: “but one more step in wickedness,” she triumphantly said, “and all my shame, all my sufferings are over.” She congratulated herself upon the lucky thought; when, but an instant after, the tears trickled down her face for the sorrow her death, her sinful death, would bring to her poor and beloved parents. She then thought upon the probability of a sigh it might draw from William; and, the pride, the pleasure of that little tribute, counterpoised every struggle on the side of life.

As she saw the sun decline, “When you rise again,” she thought, “when you peep bright to-morrow morning into this little room to call me up, I shall not be here to open my eyes upon a hateful day—I shall no more regret that you have waked me!—I shall be sound asleep, never to wake again in this wretched world—not even the voice of William would then awake me.”

While she found herself resolved, and evening just come on, she hurried out of the house, and hastened to the fatal wood; the scene of her dishonour—the scene of intended murder—and now the meditated scene of suicide.

As she walked along between the close-set tree, she saw, at a little distance, the spot where William first made love to her; and where at every appointment he used to wait her coming. She darted her eye away from this place with horror; but, after a few moments of emotion, she walked slowly up to it—shed tears, and pressed with her trembling lips that tree, against which she was accustomed to lean while he talked with her. She felt an inclination to make this the spot to die in; but her preconcerted, and the less frightful death, of leaping into a pool on the other side of the wood, induced her to go onwards.

Presently, she came near the place where her child, and William’s, was exposed to perish. Here she started with a sense of the most atrocious guilt; and her whole frame shook with the dread of an approaching, an omnipotent Judge, to sentence her for murder.

She halted, appalled, aghast, undetermined whether to exist longer beneath the pressure of a criminal conscience, or die that very hour, and meet her final condemnation.

She proceeded a few steps farther, and beheld the very ivy-bush close to which her infant lay when she left him exposed; and now, from this minute recollection, all the mother rising in her soul, she saw, as it were, her babe again in its deserted state; and bursting into tears of bitterest contrition and compassion, she cried—“As I was merciless to thee, my child, thy father has been pitiless to me! As I abandoned thee to die with cold and hunger, he has forsaken, and has driven me to die by self-slaughter.”

She now fixed her eager eyes on the distant pond, and walked more nimbly than before, to rid herself of her agonising sensations.

Just as she had nearly reached the wished-for brink, she heard a footstep, and saw, by the glimmering of a clouded moon, a man approaching. She turned out of her path, for fear her intentions should be guessed at, and opposed; but still, as she walked another way, her eye was wishfully bent towards the water that was to obliterate her love and her remorse—obliterate, forever, William and his child.

It was now that Henry, who, to prevent scandal, had stolen at that still hour of night to rid the curate of the incumbrance so irksome to him, and take the foundling to a woman whom he had hired for the charge—it was now that Henry came up, with the child of Agnes in his arms, carefully covered all over from the night’s dew.

“Agnes, is it you?” cried Henry, at a little distance. “Where are you going thus late?”

“Home, sir,” said she, and rushed among the trees.

“Stop, Agnes,” he cried; “I want to bid you farewell; to-morrow I am going to leave this part of the country for a long time; so God bless you, Agnes.”

Saying this, he stretched out his arm to shake her by the hand.

Her poor heart, trusting that his blessing, for want of more potent offerings, might, perhaps, at this tremendous crisis ascend to Heaven in her behalf, she stopped, returned, and put out her hand to take his.

“Softly!” said he; “don’t wake my child; this spot has been a place of danger to him, for underneath this very ivy-bush it was that I found him.”

“Found what?” cried Agnes, with a voice elevated to a tremulous scream.

“I will not tell you the story,” replied Henry; “for no one I have ever yet told of it would believe me.”

“I will believe you—I will believe you,” she repeated with tones yet more impressive.

“Why, then,” said Henry, “only five weeks ago—”

“Ah!” shrieked Agnes.

“What do you mean?” said Henry.

“Go on,” she articulated, in the same voice.

“Why, then, as I was passing this very place, I wish I may never speak truth again, if I did not find” (here he pulled aside the warm rug in which the infant was wrapped) “this beautiful child.”

“With a cord?—”

“A cord was round its neck.”

“’Tis mine—the child is mine—’tis mine—my child—I am the mother and the murderer—I fixed the cord, while the ground shook under me—while flashes of fire darted before my eyes!—while my heart was bursting with despair and horror! But I stopped short—I did not draw the noose—I had a moment of strength, and I ran away. I left him living—he is living now—escaped from my hands—and I am no longer ashamed, but overcome with joy that he is mine! I bless you, my dear, my dear, for saving his life—for giving him to me again—for preserving my life, as well as my child’s.”

Here she took her infant, pressed it to her lips and to her bosom; then bent to the ground, clasped Henry’s knees, and wept upon his feet.

He could not for a moment doubt the truth of what she said; her powerful yet broken accents, her convulsive embraces of the child, even more than her declaration, convinced him she was its mother.

“Good Heaven!” cried Henry, “and this is my cousin William’s child!”

“But your cousin does not know it,” said she; “I never told him—he was not kind enough to embolden me; therefore do not blame him for my sin; he did not know of my wicked designs—he did not encourage me—”

“But he forsook you, Agnes.”

“He never said he would not. He always told me he could not marry me.”

“Did he tell you so at his first private meeting?”

“No.”

“Nor at the second?”

“No; nor yet at the third.”

“When was it he told you so?”

“I forget the exact time; but I remember it was on that very evening when I confessed to him—”

“What?”

“That he had won my heart.”

“Why did you confess it?”

“Because he asked me and said it would make him happy if I would say so.”

“Cruel! dishonourable!”

“Nay, do not blame him; he cannot help not loving me, no more than I can help loving him.”

Henry rubbed his eyes.

“Bless me, you weep! I always heard that you were brought up in a savage country; but I suppose it is a mistake; it was your cousin William.”

“Will not you apply to him for the support of your child?” asked Henry.

“If I thought he would not be angry.”

“Angry! I will write to him on the subject if you will give me leave.”

“But do not say it is by my desire. Do not say I wish to trouble him. I would sooner beg than be a trouble to him.”

“Why are you so delicate?”

“It is for my own sake; I wish him not to hate me.”

“Then, thus you may secure his respect. I will write to him, and let him know all the circumstances of your case. I will plead for his compassion on his child, but assure him that no conduct of his will ever induce you to declare (except only to me, who knew of your previous acquaintance) who is the father.”

To this she consented; but when Henry offered to take from her the infant, and carry him to the nurse he had engaged, to this she would not consent.

“Do you mean, then, to acknowledge him yours?” Henry asked.

“Nothing shall force me to part from him again. I will keep him, and let my neighbours judge of me as they please.”

Here Henry caught at a hope he feared to name before. “You will then have no objection,” said he, “to clear an unhappy girl to a few friends, with whom her character has suffered by becoming, at my request, his nurse?”

“I will clear any one, so that I do not accuse the father.”

“You give me leave, then, in your name, to tell the whole story to some particular friends, my cousin William’s part in it alone excepted?”

“I do.”

Henry now exclaimed, “God bless you!” with greater fervour than when he spoke it before; and he now hoped the night was nearly gone, that the time might be so much the shorter before Rebecca should be reinstated in the esteem of her father, and of all those who had misjudged her.

“God bless you!” said Agnes, still more fervently, as she walked with unguided steps towards her home; for her eyes never wandered from the precious object which caused her unexpected return.