Something in the words spoken almost at random, opened the closed floodgate of tears which quenched the frenzy blazing into a devouring flame, and saved the stout heart from breaking. ‘Yes, I were fond and proud of my ’Mily, with good reason,’ protested Mrs. Polley more softly, though the softness was expressed by the deep sobs which rent her breast, and the torrents of tears that gushed from her eyes. ‘There was none of the other gals fit to hold a candle to her. She were that smart, my little ’Mily, she could run and speak by the time she was eighteen months. I’ve seen her a sitting up rosy and full of roguery, playing with the pillows in this here bed, when other children would have been lying like so many little logses. Her fingers and her tongue alike were that clever! She had finished her piece and begun another of this very bed quilt long before Ann or ’Liza had got half through with either of theirs—and her the youngest and only in her first quarter at the school. “I’ll make them stand about, mother, she would say to me,” with one of her merry laughs; “and I’ll wager I’ll be married first, as well as first done with my bit of the crochet, and get the quilt all to myself.” So she has been married first, and she has died first, leaving me and her father behind, as ought by rights to have gone long before her. Oh! ’Mily, ’Mily, if I could but have died for you!’ Poor young ’Mily Polley’s death on her marriage morning caused a great revulsion in the feelings which had been entertained towards her in her native town. Her awful fate wiped out, in human eyes, the sum of her transgressions. Her death was regarded—not so much in the light of retribution as of atonement. A tender veil of commiseration and charity was drawn over her offences till they were in a fair way to be forgotten as well as forgiven. Her memory was likely to survive in Friarton and appeal to all gentle, romantic hearts for generations to come—not as that of the erring girl, but as that of the newly-made wife who perished in the first hours of her wifehood. ’Mily’s intimate associates were forced to acknowledge remorsefully the little allowance they had made for her temptations, and the unanimity with which they had forsaken her in her humiliation.