“Say, you want to look out for her—­I see she’s getting the red back in her blood!”

CHAPTER XXVI.

How the Red Came Back to the Blood to be a Snare

The watchful eyes of the Bishop had seen truly.  Not only was the red coming back to the blood of Martha, but the fair flesh to her meagre frame, the spring of youth to her step and living fire to her voice and the glance of her eyes.  Her husband was pleased.  He had made a new creature of the poor, worn wreck found by the wayside, weak, emaciated, reeling under her burden.  He rejoiced to know he had done a true service.  He was glad, moreover, to know that she made an admirable mother to the little woman-child.  Prudence, indeed, had brought them closer to each other, slowly, subtly, in little ways to disarm the most timid caution.

And this mothering and fathering of little Prudence was a work by no means colourless or uneventful.  The child had displayed a grievous capacity for remaining unimpressed by even the best-weighed opinions of her protector.  She was also appallingly fluent in and partial to the idioms and metaphors of revealed religion,—­a circumstance that would not infrequently cause the sensitive to shudder.

Thus, when she chose to call her largest and least sightly doll the Holy Ghost, the ingenuity of those about her was taxed to rebuke her in ways that would be effective without being harsh.  It was felt, too, that her offence had been but slightly mitigated when she called the same doll, thereafter, “Thou son of perdition and shedder of innocent blood.”  Not until this disfigured effigy became Bishop Wright, and the remaining dolls his more or less disobedient wives, was it felt that she had approached even remotely the plausible and the decorous.

A glance at some of the verses she was from time to time constrained to learn will perhaps indicate the line of her transgressions, and yet avert a disclosure of details that were often tragic.  She was taught these verses from a little old book bound in the gaudiest of Dutch gilt paper, as if to relieve the ever-present severity of the text and the distressing scenes portrayed in the illustrating copperplates.  For example, on a morning when there had been hasty words at breakfast, arising from circumstances immaterial to this narrative, she might be made to learn:—­

  “That I did not see Frances just now I am glad,
   For Winifred says she looked sullen and sad. 
   When I ask her the reason, I know very well
   That Frances will blush the true reason to tell.

  “And I never again shall expect to hear said
   That she pouts at her milk with a toast of white bread,
   When both are as good as can possibly be—­
   Though Betsey, for breakfast, perhaps may have tea.”

With no sort of propriety could be set down in printed words the occurrence that led to her reciting twenty times, somewhat defiantly in the beginning, but at last with the accents and expression of countenance proper to remorse, the following verses:—­