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 Adèle, 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 Adèle, 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 Adèle all that the little stranger herself knew respecting her history. "And not to know your mother, Adèle! that s so very queer!" Adèle 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 Provençal blood mounts to the cheek and brow of Adèle 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 Adèle 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, and on which comes betimes the recollection of a father's kindly face, that in the growing distance makes her isolation seem even more appalling. Rose, good soul, detects these humors by a keen, girlish instinct, and, gliding up to her, passes her arm around her,-- "What is it now, Adèle, dear?" And she, looking down at her, (for Adèle was the taller by half a head,) says,-- "What a good mother you have, Rose!" "Only that!"--and Rose laughs gleefully for a moment, when, bethinking herself where the secret grief lay, her sweet face is overcast in an instant, and reaching up her two hands, she draws down the face of Adèle to hers, and kisses her on either cheek.