“But will ye lead him in the path which his parents have trodden?” demanded the Quaker.  “Can ye teach him the enlightened faith which his father has died for, and for which I—­even I—­am soon to become an unworthy martyr?  The boy has been baptized in blood; will ye keep the mark fresh and ruddy upon his forehead?”

“I will not deceive you,” answered Dorothy.  “If your child become our child, we must breed him up in the instruction which Heaven has imparted to us; we must pray for him the prayers of our own faith; we must do toward him according to the dictates of our own consciences, and not of yours.  Were we to act otherwise, we should abuse your trust, even in complying with your wishes.”

The mother looked down upon her boy with a troubled countenance, and then turned her eyes upward to heaven.  She seemed to pray internally, and the contention of her soul was evident.

“Friend,” she said, at length, to Dorothy, “I doubt not that my son shall receive all earthly tenderness at thy hands.  Nay, I will believe that even thy imperfect lights may guide him to a better world, for surely thou art on the path thither.  But thou hast spoken of a husband.  Doth he stand here among this multitude of people?  Let him come forth, for I must know to whom I commit this most precious trust.”

She turned her face upon the male auditors, and after a momentary delay Tobias Pearson came forth from among them.  The Quaker saw the dress which marked his military rank, and shook her head; but then she noted the hesitating air, the eyes that struggled with her own and were vanquished, the color that went and came and could find no resting-place.  As she gazed an unmirthful smile spread over her features, like sunshine that grows melancholy in some desolate spot.  Her lips moved inaudibly, but at length she spake: 

“I hear it, I hear it!  The voice speaketh within me and saith, ’Leave thy child, Catharine, for his place is here, and go hence, for I have other work for thee.  Break the bonds of natural affection, martyr thy love, and know that in all these things eternal wisdom hath its ends.’  I go, friends, I go.  Take ye my boy, my precious jewel.  I go hence trusting that all shall be well, and that even for his infant hands there is a labor in the vineyard.”

She knelt down and whispered to Ilbrahim, who at first struggled and clung to his mother with sobs and tears, but remained passive when she had kissed his cheek and arisen from the ground.  Having held her hands over his head in mental prayer, she was ready to depart.

“Farewell, friends in mine extremity,” she said to Pearson and his wife; “the good deed ye have done me is a treasure laid up in heaven, to be returned a thousandfold hereafter.—­And farewell, ye mine enemies, to whom it is not permitted to harm so much as a hair of my head, nor to stay my footsteps even for a moment.  The day is coming when ye shall call upon me to witness for ye to this one sin uncommitted, and I will rise up and answer.”