Instantly, in a flood of penitent tears, her arms were flung about his neck and she was promising over and over, “I will, I will,” and sobbing on his shoulder.

He suffered the embrace for a few moments and then pushed her gently aside.

“Papa is tired now, dear.  I want to teach you a Bible verse, that you must never, never forget:  ‘The way of the transgressor is hard.’  Say it after me.”

The child brushed her tears away and stood upright.

“The way of the transgressor is hard,” she repeated in a sobbing voice.

“Repeat it three times.”

She repeated it three times slowly.

“Tell Uncle John and Aunt Prue that that was the last thing I taught you, will you?”

“Yes, papa,” catching her breath with a little sob.

“And now run away and come back in a hour and I will read the letters to you.  Ask Nurse to tell you when it is an hour.”

The child skipped away, and before many minutes he heard her laughing with the children on the beach.  With the letters in his hand, and the crumpled handkerchief with the moist red spots tucked away behind him in the chair, he leaned back and closed his eyes.  His breath came easily after a little time and he dozed and dreamed.  He was a boy again and it was a moonlight night, snow was on the ground, and he was walking home from town besides his oxen; he had sold the load of wood that he had started with before daylight; he had eaten his two lunches of bread and salt beef and doughnuts, and now, cold and tired and sleepy, he was walking back home at the side of his oxen.  The stars were shining, the ground was as hard as stone beneath his tread, the oxen labored on slowly, it seemed as if he would never get home.  His mother would have a hot supper for him, and the boys would ask what the news was, and what he had seen, and his little sister would ask if he had bought that piece of ginger bread for her.  He stirred and the papers rustled in his fingers and there was a harsh sound somewhere as of a bolt grating, and his cell was small and the bed so narrow, so narrow and so hard, and he was suffocating and could not get out.

“Papa! papa!  It’s an hour,” whispered a voice in his ear.  The eyelids quivered, the eyes looked straight at her but did not see her.

“Ah Sing!  Ah Sing!  Get me to bed!” he groaned.

Frightened at the expression of his face the child ran to call Nurse and her father’s man, Ah Sing.  Nurse kept her out of her father’s chamber all that day, but she begged for her letter and Nurse gave it to her.  She carried it in her hand that day and the next, at night keeping it under her pillow.

Before many days the strange uncle came and he led her in to her father and let her kiss his hand, and afterward he read Aunt Prue’s soiled letter to her and told her that she and Nurse were going to Aunt Prue’s home next week.

“Won’t you go, too?” she asked, clinging to him as no one had ever clung to him before.