property is to be divided and alienated from the name. This is one reason why I never was much of a favourite at home. They forgave Sarah, for she was beautiful, and just the person to be an heiress. But co-heiresses are the bugbear of the Mortimers. Ah me! If there had been no such saying as this, or if we had been poor girls, it might have made a difference! Not in me, to be sure; I need not be sentimental about it. I never saw an individual in this world I could have fancied but one, and he, you know, never asked me; so it could not have made the slightest difference to me. However, if there’s one thing more than another that my heart is set to resist, it is letting this prophecy be fulfilled in our time. I’d rather compass sea and land to find a Mortimer! I’d rather set out, old as I am, and hunt for one with a lantern through the world! Sarah, though she is so capricious and contrary, is of the same mind. It was she who told me of this Mr. Richard Arkwright, whom I had forgotten all about. And yet, you see, after showing such decided interest, she turns upon one so! What a very odd thing it is that she did not marry! I never could make it out, for my part. Nobody could imagine, to see her now, how very pretty, nay, how beautiful she was; and such a way with her! and dressed, to be sure, like a duchess. All the young men in the county were after her before she went abroad. But dear, dear! to think what a changed life when she came home, and lost her voice, and shut herself up in her own room. There is nothing I dislike more than curiosity, or prying, or suspiciousness; but I _should_ like to know the rights of it--how Sarah went on abroad. To be sure my father was anxious enough that _she_ should get married, and have a good humble-minded husband, who would take the name of Mortimer. It was only me that he would not hear of any proposal for. I don’t think he would have broken his heart if, like the Milly Mortimer in Queen Anne’s time, I had been so obliging as to die. However, here we are, just as we were in the nursery, two Miss Mortimers. Sarah, who might have had half a dozen good marriages, just the same as I am; and I protest I don’t even know that there are two people existing in the world who have the smallest collateral right to divide the property and take it away from the name; unless Richard Arkwright should happen to have co-heiresses! married to husbands who will not change to Mortimer! Don’t let me think of such a horror! These are our circumstances in the meantime. It is a very sad thing for a family when there are no collateral branches. I forgot to say that how this Richard Arkwright came about, was by the strange accident of Squire George, who died in 1713, having _two sons_! CHAPTER V.