After that on Sabbath mornings Philippa sat with her father, in the silent upper chamber. At first Henry Roberts, listening--listening-- f or the Voice, thought, rapturously, that at the eleventh hour he was to win a soul--the most precious soul in his world!--to his faith. But when, after a while, he questioned her, he saw that this was not so; she stayed away from other churches, but not because she cared for his church. This troubled him, for the faith he had outgrown was better than no faith.
"Do you have doubts concerning the soundness of either of the ministers--the old man or the young man?" he asked her, looking at her with mild, anxious eyes.
"Oh no, sir," Philly said, smiling.
"Do you dislike them--the young man or the old man?"
"Oh no, father. I love--one of them."
"Then why not go to his church?
Either minister can give you the seeds of salvation; one not less than the other. Why not sit under either ministry?"
"I don't know," Philippa said, faintly.
And indeed she did not know why she absented herself. She only knew two things: that the young man seemed to disapprove of the old man; and when she saw the young man in the pulpit, impersonal and holy, she suffered.
Therefore she would not go to hear either man.
When Dr. Lavendar came to call upon her father, he used to glance at Philippa sometimes over his spectacles while Henry Roberts was arguing about prophecies; b ut he never asked her why she stayed away from church; instead, he talked to her about John Fenn, and he seemed pleased when he heard that the young man was doing his duty in making pastoral calls. "And I--I, unworthy as I was!" Henry Roberts would say, "I heard the Voice, speaking through a sister's lips; and it said: Oh, sinner! for what, for what, what can separate, separate, from the love...
Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing."
He would stare at Dr. Lavendar with parted lips. "I HEARD IT," he would say, in a whisper.
And Dr. Lavendar, bending his head gravely, would be silent for a respectful moment, and then he would look at Philippa. "You are teaching Fenn's sister to sew?" he would say. "Very nice! Very nice!"
Philly saw a good deal of the sister that summer; the young minister, recognizing Miss Philippa's fondness for Mary, and remembering a text as to the leading of a child, took pains to bring the little girl to Henry Roberts's door once or twice a week; and as August burned away into September Philippa's pleasure in her was like a soft wind blowing on the embers of her heart and kindling a flame for which she knew no name.
She thought constantly of Mary, and had many small anxieties about her-- h er dress, her manners, her health; she even took the child into Old Chester one day to get William King to pull a little loose white tooth. Philly shook very much during the operation and mingled her tears with Mary's in that empty and bleeding moment that follows the loss of a tooth. She was so passionately tender with the little girl that the doctor told Dr. Lavendar that his match-making scheme seemed likely to prosper--"she's so fond of the sister, you should have heard her sympathize with the little thing!--that I think she will smile on the brother," he said.
"I'm afraid the brother hasn't cut his wisdom teeth yet," Dr. Lavendar said, doubtfully; "if he had, you might pull them, and she could sympathize with him; then it would all arrange itself.
Well, he's a nice boy, a nice boy;-- a nd he won't know so much when he gets a little older."
It was on the way home from Dr.
King's that Philippa's feeling of responsibility about Mary brought her a sudden temptation. They were walking hand in hand along the road. The leaves on the mottled branches of the sycamores were thinning now, and the sunshine fell warm upon the two young things, who were still a little shaken from the frightful experience of tooth-pulling. The doctor had put the small white tooth in a box and gravely presented it to Mary, and now, as they walked along, she stopped sometimes to examine it and say, proudly, how she had "bleeded and bleeded!"
"Will you tell brother the doctor said I behaved better than the circus lion when his tooth was pulled?"
"Indeed I will, Mary!"
"An' he said he'd rather pull my tooth than a lion's tooth?"
"Of course I'll tell him."
"Miss Philly, shall I dream of my tooth, do you suppose?"
Philippa laughed and said she didn't know.
"I hope I will; it means something nice. I forget what, now."
"Dreams don't mean anything, Mary."
"Oh yes, they do!" the child assured her, skipping along with one arm round the girl's slender waist. "Mrs. Semple has a dream-book, and she reads it to me every day, an' she reads me what my dreams mean. Sometimes I haven't any dreams," Mary admitted, regretfully, "but she reads all the same.
Did you ever dream about a black ox walking on its back legs? I never did.
I don't want to. It means trouble."
"Goosey!" said Miss Philippa.
"If you dream of the moon," Mary went on, happily, "it means you are going to have a beau who'll love you."
