that they hardly recognized it. Sin and evil passions glowed through its
comeliness, and wrought a horrible deformity; a smile gleamed in her
eyes, as of triumphant mockery, at their surprise and grief.

"Daughter," cried John Inglefield, between wrath and sorrow, "stay and be
your father's blessing, or take his curse with you!"

For an instant Prudence lingered and looked back into the fire-lighted
room, while her countenance wore almost the expression as if she were
struggling with a fiend, who had power to seize his victim even within
the hallowed precincts of her father's hearth. The fiend prevailed; and
Prudence vanished into the outer darkness. When the family rushed to the
door, they could see nothing, but heard the sound of wheels rattling over
the frozen ground.

That same night, among the painted beauties at the theatre of a
neighboring city, there was one whose dissolute mirth seemed inconsistent
with any sympathy for pure affections, and for the joys and griefs which
are hallowed by them. Yet this was Prudence Inglefield. Her visit to
the Thanksgiving fireside was the realization of one of those waking
dreams in which the guilty soul will sometimes stray back to its
innocence. But Sin, alas! is careful of her bond-slaves; they hear her
voice, perhaps, at the holiest moment, and are constrained to go whither
she summons them. The same dark power that drew Prudence Inglefleld from
her father's hearth--the same in its nature, though heightened then to a
dread necessity--would snatch a guilty soul from the gate of heaven, and
make its sin and its punishment alike eternal.