into those old coquetries of dress against which Maverick had cautioned
him, and which in their quiet country atmosphere had been subdued into a
modest homeliness that was certainly very charming.

Miss Sophia, however, the elder of the two Bowrigg daughters, was a
young lady not easily balked of her intent; and conceiving a violent
fondness for Adele, whether by reason of the graces of her character, or
by reason of her foreign speech, in which she could stammeringly join,
to the great mystification of all others, she soon forced herself into a
patronizing intimacy with Adele, and was a frequent visitor at the
parsonage. With a great fund of assurance, a rare and unappeasable
glibness of tongue, and that lack of refined delicacy which invariably
belongs to such noisy demonstrativeness, Miss Sophia had after only one
or two interviews ferreted out from Adele all that the little stranger
herself knew respecting her history.

"And not to know your mother, Adele! that s so very queer!"

Adele winces at this, but seems--to so coarse an observer--only
preoccupied with her work.

"Is'nt it queer?" persists the garrulous creature. "I knew a girl in the
city who did not see her mother after she was three,--think of that! But
then, you know, she was a bad woman."

The hot Provencal blood mounts to the cheek and brow of Adele in an
instant, and her eye flashes. But it is quite impossible to show anger
in view of the stolid face of her companion, with nothing in it but an
unthinking, girlish curiosity.

"We will talk of something else, Sophie."

"Oh! then you don't like to speak of it! Dear me! I certainly wont,
then."

Yet this rattle-brained girl has no real ill-nature; and it is
surprising what a number of such well-meaning people go blundering about
society, inflicting cheerful wounds in all directions by mere reason of
their bluntness and lack of all delicacy of feeling.

But it is by no means the first time the sensibilities of Adele have
been touched to the quick. She is approaching that age when they ripen
with marvellous rapidity. There is never an evening now at that cheerful
home of the Elderkins--lighted up as it is with the beaming smiles of
that Christian mother, Mrs. Elderkin--but there sweeps over the mind of
the poor girl, at some interval in the games or the chat, a terrible
sense of some great loss she has suffered, of which she knows not the
limits,--a cruel sense of isolation in which she wanders, a