Mrs. Croom shot one glance at Ephraim, eager and happy in his watching.  She did what nothing but the lovelight in her son’s face could have caused her to do.  She struck the girl lightly but testily on the side of the face.

Ephraim was as foolish as are most men in sight of a damsel in distress.  He made no impartial inquiry into the real cause of trouble; he did not seek Justice in her place of hiding.  He stepped to his mother’s side, stern and determined, remembering only that she was often unwise, and that he could control her.

“You ought not to have done that.  You must never do it again.”

With the print of floury fingers on her glowing cheeks the girl sat more astonished than angry, full of ruth when her aunt began to sob aloud.

The mother knew that she was no longer the first woman in her son’s love.

It was without doubt, Mrs. Croom’s first bitter pang of jealousy that lay at the beginning of those causes which drove Susannah out upon a strange pilgrimage.  But above and beyond her personal jealousy was a consideration certainly dearer to a woman into whose inmost religious life was woven the fibre of the partisan.  As she expressed it to herself, she agonised before the Lord in a new fear lest her unconverted son should be established in his unbelief by love for a woman who had never sought for heavenly grace; but, in truth, that which she sought was that both should swear allegiance to her own interpretation of grace.  In this prayer some good came to her, the willingness to sacrifice her jealousy if need be; but, after the prayer another thought entered into her mind, which she held to be divine direction; she must focus all her efforts upon the girl’s conversion.  In her heart all the time a still small voice told her that love was the fulfilling of the law, but so still, so small, so habitual was it that she lost it as we lose the ticking of a clock, and it was not with increased love for Susannah that she began a course of redoubled zeal.

The girl became frightened, not so much of her aunt as of God.  The simple child’s prayer for the keeping of her soul which she had been in the habit of repeating morning and evening became a terror to her, because she did not understand her aunt’s phraseology.  The “soul” it dealt with was not herself, her thoughts, feelings, and powers, but a mysterious something apart from these, for whose welfare these must all be sacrificed.

Susannah had heard of fairies and ghosts; she inclined to shove this sort of soul into the same unreal region.  The dreary artificial heaven, which seemed to follow logically if she accepted the basal fact of a soul separated from all her natural powers, could be dispensed with also.  This was her hope, but she was not sure.  How could she be sure when she was so young and dependent?  It was almost her only solace to interpret Ephraim’s silence by her own unbelief, and she rested her weary mind against her vague notions of Ephraim’s support.