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A Trap is set for two Tender Souls.
Doll never thought the demon would wait until her death-bed to come to her. Every moonlight night and every sunny day she looked for him and thought, ‘Perhaps this day or this night he will come to me.’ She always wore even quite commonly her prettiest, most worldly clothes, and she kept her shaggy black hair as neat as she was able. She thought, ‘He sees me always, everything I do, everything I wear,’ and she kept herself comely for him. She guessed he even knew her thoughts, and so she dedicated them to him.
In her own chamber she daily worshipped and prayed to Satan, as the fiend had taught her; that is, by foul blasphemies, such as the reversal of the Lord’s Prayer, etc. She even wrote little hymns to Satan and entuned them for him. She felt that she should be about some harm, such, for instance, as the bewitchment of the godly, but she received no command, so she did, for some time at least, no devilment. She was happy and grew sleek.
The widow was already courted by three men, all reputable widowers and church members. Now that the windows were opened and Doll sang as she worked, and her own mind was taken up with her suitors, she did not fear her so much. Each went her own way.
Doll had always shown a dawdling and trifling attitude towards honest labour. And in this offence Bilby had encouraged her. For he had had her out in the woods and the fields (where there was nothing a young female could do) with himself, instead of leaving her at home to serve Hannah, as would have been more proper.
Now that he was gone, Doll still continued in her childish and frivolous wanderings. She often sat herself on the stone fence by the willow brook which divided the lands of the Bilbys and the Thumbs. The bonded boys upon the farm said they often saw her sitting upon the stone fence and feeding small rotten apples to Ahab (whose ferocity now had grown hideous). Yet this girl patted him freely, talking to him, laying her face against his cheek, and all these attentions Ahab accepted of. She wished him for her familiar, but the creature (so she told Mr. Zelley) would never do one of the things she asked of him, except to pursue and render ridiculous young Thumb.
Mrs. Thumb heard that her black bull was often down on the boundary with Bilby’s Doll. She asked that he be penned, for she guessed that Doll was at the bottom of Ahab’s remarkable dissatisfaction in Titus. She wished the bull withdrawn from the young woman’s influence. By so doing and thus making these fields by the willow brook safe to cross, she did great harm to her own household, for now it was Labour and Sorrow who came daily (if they could) to see Doll. Undoubtedly she had been waiting for the twins to come and play with her. She must have seen in these weak and disobedient little girls fit matter for her to work upon to the further enlargement of the Kingdom of Hell. For she lay in wait there, and finally they came to her. They came slyly. No one at first knew they came, and they played at ungodly games, furtively, where no one of either house could know. Thus passed September, and October, and the half of November.