“Why, Mamma, you’re soaked!” she cried.  “Come! it’s up to the bed you must go at once, and I’ll bring you a hot drink when you’re undressed.  You can look at your books better in bed, you know.”

“That’s a true word,” said Annie; “so I can.  I can have ’en all around me on the bed, can’t I, Vassie?  I’ll take en up, though; don’t you touch en, I fear you’m nought but an unconverted vessel, and I won’t have ’ee touchen my books.”

Assuring her she should have it all her own way, Vassie got her out of the room and upstairs, while Katie heated water for a stone bottle to be put at her feet.  Ishmael and Boase went into the parlour and sat down with grave faces.

“I don’t understand it at all, Padre,” said Ishmael.  “This isn’t a bit like her.  Of course, she’s always been funny, but she’s never done a thing like this.”

“It may be nothing but her annual attack of salvation,” said the Parson drily.  “I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you; only keep an eye on her.  She’s not as young as she was, and it won’t do her any good to be running about getting wet through.”

“She’ll never listen to anything I say.”

“Well, Vassie seems able to manage her all right.  She’s a most capable girl, that!”

“She is indeed,” said Ishmael, pleased at praise of his sister, whom he knew Boase as a rule was apt to criticise silently rather than admire.  “I don’t think my life here would be possible without Vassie.  There are times when I feel I want to take mother’s head and knock it against the wall.  It sounds awful, but it’s true.  I want to knock it and hear the crunch it would make.  There!  But you can’t think what it’s like sometimes.  One’s soul is thrown at one, so to speak, morning, noon, and night.  I don’t believe it’s a good thing, anyway, to be always taking one’s soul out to feel its pulse.  Except that mother’s uneducated and ignorant about it, she reminds me very much of a woman at that vicarage in Somerset I used to go to sometimes in the holidays.  She was the aunt of the family and was what she called a deaconess.  It’s a sort of half and half thing, not like a Sister of Mercy exactly....”

“A Cousin of Mercy, shall we say?” suggested the Parson.  “I think I once met the lady and I know what you mean.  She had rows of little books, hadn’t she?”

“Yes, and thought it was the sin against the Holy Ghost if she missed saying what she called her Hours.  I’m sorry to be profane, but she did annoy me so though I was only a youngster.  And now mother seems to be getting very like it.  I wouldn’t mind a bit if it made her happy, but it doesn’t, not a bit of it.”

“Nothing would make your mother happy—­she wouldn’t think it right; but she’s only like a lot of women in that.  The evils of Puritanism seem to have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept on cropping up generation after generation.  Your mother is a born Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan.  There is no more arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under acquired Catholicism.  I am a bad missionary, I suppose, but I have seen too much of these women.”