Her infant's image was continually floating on Maria's sight, and the
first smile of intelligence remembered, as none but a mother, an unhappy
mother, can conceive. She heard her half speaking half cooing, and felt
the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom--a bosom bursting
with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining
in vain. From a stranger she could indeed receive the maternal aliment,
Maria was grieved at the thought--but who would watch her with a
mother's tenderness, a mother's self-denial?

The retreating shadows of former sorrows rushed back in a gloomy train,
and seemed to be pictured on the walls of her prison, magnified by
the state of mind in which they were viewed--Still she mourned for her
child, lamented she was a daughter, and anticipated the aggravated ills
of life that her sex rendered almost inevitable, even while dreading she
was no more. To think that she was blotted out of existence was agony,
when the imagination had been long employed to expand her faculties;
yet to suppose her turned adrift on an unknown sea, was scarcely less
afflicting.

After being two days the prey of impetuous, varying emotions, Maria
began to reflect more calmly on her present situation, for she had
actually been rendered incapable of sober reflection, by the discovery
of the act of atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not
have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a
similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by
an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently
resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed
patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point the dart of anguish,
and suppressed the heart heavings of indignant nature merely by the
force of contempt. Now she endeavoured to brace her mind to fortitude,