To prove that she did so, she laid herself out to entertain and amuse him, and with this view, when the servant had left the room, she treated him to a comic account of her day’s adventures, and having talked herself into a great state of communicativeness and sociability, had just reached the bass cow episode, when a slight sound, not very unlike the voice of the cow itself, reached her ear--_Harry had fallen fast asleep!_ CHAPTER XXII.--KATE SOWS THE WIND. So Kate Marsden married the cotton-spinner, and old Mr. Hazlehurst repurchased his farm on very easy terms. We wonder which of the two was best pleased with the bargain! Kate turned very pale when she promised to love, honour, and obey a man whom she disliked, despised, and intended to rule; nor do we wonder at it, for, with all her faults, Kate perceived the intrinsic beauty of truth, and loved it, as she did everything beautiful. But though she loathed herself for what she was doing, though her bitterest enemy could not have taken a harsher view of her conduct than she herself took, she had gone too far to retract, and having swallowed the camel of crushing her own heart and that of Arthur Hazlehurst, she could not stultify herself by straining at the gnat of swearing falsely in the service for the solemnization of matrimony. Kate’s was one of that peculiar order of consciences which can commit a sin knowingly, on an emergency, but dare not be guilty of a blunder. In the one case, the end appears to justify the means; while in the other, the entire transaction is unworthy. Sophistry, Kate, sophistry! which, while you think it, and act upon it, fails to satisfy even your warped and distorted sense of right and wrong.