and sister did not rejoice; and instead of approving of the
match, they remonstrated vehemently against it.

Sophy thought them foolish and ungrateful. She grew angry, and remained
obstinately fixed to her purpose, and the affair ended in a family
rupture.

Mrs. Grimshawe refused to live with Sophy, if she married Noah Cotton;
and Mary could not leave her mother. Mary, who was a shrewd observer of
human character, was greatly struck with the scene she had witnessed in
the public house. She did not like Noah Cotton. She suspected him to be
a bad man, who was labouring under the pangs of remorse rather than of
disease. She had communicated these fears to her mother, and to this
circumstance might be attributed her steady refusal to sanction a
marriage so advantageous, in a pecuniary point of view, to them all.

Sophy was determined to secure the rich husband, and have her own way;
and the very next week she became the wife of the wealthy farmer, and
the newly-wedded pair left ---- in a neat gig to spend the honeymoon in
Noah Cotton's rural homestead in the pretty parish of F----.

CHAPTER XI.

THE DISCLOSURE.

Twenty months passed away, and the young bride had never once been home
to visit her old friends. Her mother grew more infirm and feeble every
day, and pined sadly after her absent child; and the tears were often
upon Mary's cheeks. Sophy's act of wilful disobedience had been forgiven
from the hour that the thoughtless rebel had become a wife; but her
neglect rankled in the heart of both mother and sister.

"She has forgotten us quite," said the ailing old woman. "The distance
is not great. She might come, especially as her husband keeps a horse
and chaise; and what are ten miles after all? I have often walked double
that in my young days to see a friend, much more a mother and sister.
Well, I shall not be here long,--I feel that. The day of my release will
be welcome to me, and she will be sorry when I am gone that she
neglected to come and see me."

Now, though Dorothy Grimshawe, in her nervous, querulous state, grumbled
over the absence of her daughter, she was never so dear to the heart of
her faulty child as at the very time she complained of her neglect.

Sophy Cotton never knew the real value of a mother's love until she felt
upon her own shoulders the cares and responsibilities of a house. She
longed intensely to see her and Mary again, as the nice presents of
butter, ham, and eggs that she