e began to reverence
the feeling that made Judith Grey choose the rough and ungenial life
with the Hewletts, to comfort and sympathy with her friends.

Mrs Carbonel and Judith were mistaken in thinking the transaction could
pass unknown to the rest of the family. Polly was near at hand, but had
hidden herself, on the lad's approach, for fear of being called to
account for not being at school, and she reported to her mother that
"Madam Gobbleall had been ever so long with aunt, a-trying to persuade
her to go away, and live with them fine folks as she was in service
with."

Molly had a certain real affection for her sister; but to both her and
Dan, the removal would be like the loss of the goose that laid the
golden eggs, and there is no saying what poor Judith had to go through.
Molly came and cried torrents of tears, taking it for granted that
Judith meant to go, and must be frightened out of it. It was of no use
to declare that she had refused the lady. Molly was so much in the
habit of semi-deception, that she could not believe the assurance; and
to hear her lamentations over her dear sister, for whom no one could do
like a blood-relation, and her horror at the idea of strangers being
preferred to herself, one would have thought--as indeed she believed
herself--that she was Judith's most devoted and indefatigable nurse.
And to think of them Gobblealls being so sly, such snakes in the grass,
as to try to get her away, unknownst! She would not have them prying
about her house again.

Dan declared it was all the cunning of them, for fear Judith should
become chargeable to the parish, and there! her fine friends would die,
or give her up, or she would just be thrown on the parish, and passed on
to a strange workhouse, and then she would see what she got by leaving
her kin. It was just like their sly tricks!

In point of fact, if Judith had become chargeable to the parish, Dan's
remarks would have been equally true of Uphill, whence she would have
been handed to the place where her father had lived, and it was the
object of every place to dispose of all superfluous paupers. But Dan
and Molly wished her to imagine them willing to keep her freely, in case
of a failure of the supplies!

Poor thing! They really thought that their opposition had induced her
to drop the idea, and that it was for their own ease, or the good of the
rates, that the Carbonel ladies had tried to persuade her to leave them.
Molly did not