“She isn’t like a little girl now, is she?”

“No, she is grown up like that lady on the beach with the children; but she describes herself to you and promises to send her picture!”

“Oh, good!” exclaimed the child, dancing around the chair, and coming back to stand quietly at her father’s side.

“What is the house like inside?  Like this house?”

“No, not at all.  There is a wide, old-fashioned hall, with a dark carpet in it and a table and several chairs, and engravings on the walls, and a broad staircase that leads to large, pleasant rooms above; and there is a small room on the top of the house where you can go up and see vessels entering the harbor.  Down-stairs the long parlor is the room that I know best; that had a dark carpet and dark paper on the walls and many windows, windows in front and back and two on the side, there were portraits over the mantel of her father and mother, and other pictures around everywhere, and a piano that she loved to play for her father on, and books in book cases, and, in winter, plants; it was not like any one else’s parlor, for her father liked to sit there and she brought in everything that would please him.  Her father was old like me, and sick, and she was a dear daughter like you.”

“Did he die?” she asked.

“Yes, he died.  He died sooner than he would have died because some one he thought a great deal of did something very wicked and almost killed his daughter with grief.  How would I feel if some one should make you so unhappy and I could not defend you and had to die and leave you alone.”

“Would you want to kill him—­the man that hurt me?”

But his eyes were on the water and not on her face; his countenance became ashy, he gasped and hurried his handkerchief to his lips.  Jeroma was not afraid of the bright spots that he sought to conceal by crumpling the handkerchief in his hand, she had known a long time that when her father was excited those red spots came on his handkerchief.  She knew, too, that the physician had said that when he began to cough he would die, but she had never heard him cough very much, and could not believe that he must ever die.

“Papa, what became of the man that hurt Aunt Prue and made her father die?”

“He lived and was the unhappiest wretch in existence.  But Aunt Prue tried to forgive him, and she used to pray for him as she always had done before.  Jerrie, when you go to Aunt Prue I want you to take her name, your own name, Prudence, and I will begin to-day to call you ‘Prue,’ so that you may get used to it.”

“Oh, will you?” she cried in her happy voice.  “I don’t like to be ‘Jerrie,’ like the boy that takes care of the horses.  When Mr. Pierce calls so loud ‘Jerry!’ I’m always afraid he means me; but Nurse says that Jerry has a y in it and mine is ie, but it sounds like my name all the time.  But Prue is soft like Pussy and I like it.  What made you ever call me Jerrie, papa?”