She spoke, notwithstanding her situation, with an intelligible and even emphatic voice; her manner in a great measure betraying the influence of the fever, and her tone and language seeming much superior to her most miserable condition.
"I am not the abject creature which I seem," she said; "at least, I was not born to be so.

I wish I _were_ that utter abject! I wish I were a wretched pauper of the lowest class--a starving vagabond--a wifeless mother--ignorance and insensibility would make me bear my lot like the outcast animal that dies patiently on the side of the common, where it has been half-starved during its life.

But I--but I--born and bred to better things, have not lost the memory of them, and they make my present condition--my shame--my poverty--my infamy--the sight of my dying babes--the sense that my own death is coming fast on--they make these things a foretaste of hell!" Lady Penelope's self-conceit and affectation were broken down by this fearful exordium.

She sobbed, shuddered, and, for once perhaps in her life, felt the real, not the assumed necessity, of putting her handkerchief to her eyes.

Lord Etherington also was moved.
"Good woman," he said, "as far as relieving your personal wants can mitigate your distress, I will see that that is fully performed, and that your poor children are attended to." "May God bless you!" said the poor woman, with a glance at the wretched forms beside her; "and may you," she added, after a momentary pause, "deserve the blessing of God, for it is bestowed in vain on those who are unworthy of it!" Lord Etherington felt, perhaps, a twinge of conscience; for he said, something hastily, "Pray go on, good woman, if you really have any thing to communicate to me as a magistrate--it is time your condition was somewhat mended, and I will cause you to be cared for directly." "Stop yet a moment," she said; "let me unload my conscience before I go hence, for no earthly relief will long avail to prolong my time here .-- I was well born, the more my present shame! well educated, the greater my present guilt!--I was always, indeed, poor, but I felt not of the ills of poverty.