The sweet bells came like a voice of pity and consolation to the ear
of Caroline. She knelt down, and clasping her hands, repeated the
prayer of millions,--
"'Ave Maria! gratia plena.'"
She continued kneeling, offering up prayer after prayer for God's
forgiveness, both for herself and for him who had brought her to
this pass of sin and misery. "'Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!'"
repeated she, bowing herself to the ground. "I am the chief of
sinners; who shall deliver me from this body of sin and affiction?"
The sweet bells kept ringing. They woke reminiscences of voices of
by-gone days. She heard her father's tones, not in anger as he
would speak now, but kind and loving as in her days of innocence.
She heard her mother, long dead--oh, how happily dead! for she
could not die of sorrow now over her dear child's fall. She heard
the voices of the fair companions of her youth, who would think
shame of her now; and amidst them all, the tones of the persuasive
tongue that wooed her maiden love. How changed it all seemed! and
yet, as the repetition of two or three notes of a bar of music
brings to recollection the whole melody to which it belongs, the few
kind words of Bigot, spoken that morning, swept all before them in a
drift of hope.
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