CHAPTER II

THE REST OF THE FAMILY

It was Saturday morning when the four young parsonage girls arrived in Mount Mark.  The elderly Misses Avery, next door, looked out of their windows, pending their appearance on Main Street, with interest and concern.  It was a serious matter, this having a whole parsonage-full of young girls so close to the old Avery mansion.  To be sure, the Averys had a deep and profound respect for ministerial households, but they were Episcopalians themselves, and in all their long lives they had never so much as heard of a widower-rector with five daughters, and no housekeeper.  There was something blood-curdling in the bare idea.

The Misses Avery considered Prudence herself rather a sweet, silly little thing.

“You have some real nice people in the Methodist church,” Miss Dora had told her.  “I dare say you will find a few of them very likeable.”

“Oh, I will like them all,” said Prudence quickly and seriously.

“Like them all!” echoed Miss Dora.  “Oh, impossible!”

“Not for us,” said Prudence.  “We are used to it, you know.  We always like people.”

“That is ridiculous,” said Miss Dora.  “It is absolutely impossible.  One can’t!  Of course, as Christians, we must tolerate, and try to help every one.  But Christian tolerance and love are——­”

“Oh, excuse me, but—­really I can’t believe there is such a thing as Christian tolerance,” said Prudence firmly.  “There is Christian love, and—­that is all we need.”  Then leaning forward:  “What do you do, Miss Avery, when you meet people you dislike at very first sight?”

“Keep away from them,” was the grim reply.

“Exactly!  And keep on disliking them,” said Prudence triumphantly.  “It’s very different with us.  When we dislike people at first sight, we visit them, and talk to them, and invite them to the parsonage, and entertain them with our best linen and silverware, and keep on getting friendlier and friendlier, and—­first thing you know, we like them fine!  It’s a perfectly splendid rule, and it has never failed us once.  Try it, Miss Avery, do!  You will be enthusiastic about it, I know.”

So the Misses Avery concluded that Prudence was very young, and couldn’t seem to quite outgrow it!  She was not entirely responsible.  And they wondered, with something akin to an agony of fear, if the younger girls “had it, too!” Therefore the Misses Avery kept watch at their respective windows, and when Miss Alice cried excitedly, “Quick!  Quick!  They are coming!” they trooped to Miss Alice’s window with a speed that would have done credit to the parsonage girls themselves.  First came the minister, whom they knew very well by this time, and considered quite respectable.  He was lively, as was to be expected of a Methodist minister, and told jokes, and laughed at them!  Now, a comical rector,—­oh, a very different matter,—­it wasn’t done, that’s all!  At any rate, here came the Methodist minister, laughing, and on one side of him tripped a small earnest-looking maiden, clasping his hand, and gazing alternately up into his face, and down at the stylish cement sidewalk beneath her feet.  On the other side, was Fairy.  The Misses Avery knew the girls by name already,—­having talked much with Prudence.