Page:Sketches of some distinguished Indian women.djvu/123

 punishment, the insanity returns and he commits suicide.

His unhappy fiance is crushed to the earth, feeling most bitterly the humiliation of having been the innocent cause of two men's death, whereby their widowed mother is left desolate. By degrees her affection for her parents and her religious faith enable her to rouse herself from the state of prostration and dejection consequent on the tragedy, and she accepts somewhat reluctantly her mother's suggestion, that, having wrecked the lives of two men who loved her, it is her duty to do her best to make the third one happy.

So the faithful, patient lover is at last rewarded, and there appears a prospect of happiness for him and his bride. But the terrible tragedy in which she has played a part has shattered her constitution, and just as she is beginning to rest happily in her husband's love, she droops and dies.

As will be seen from this short sketch, the conception is very crude, and the story is full of glaring improbabilities. But in spite of these defects, in spite of the unnecessarily tragic features, the story is not an unpleasant one, and gives ample evidence both of imagination and of knowledge of human nature, as well as of the pure and spiritual nature of the authoress which she reproduces in her heroine.

Sad, indeed, it is to think that such a gifted nature