Dora did not speak. She was too well pleased, alas! that her family should believe that she had been thus engaged, though she knew that she had not so much as opened the volume in question.
“It would have been better, my love, for you to have entered into the occupation which interests your brothers and sisters,” said Mrs. Temple, in a tone of gentle reproof. “Even reading a nice Sunday book like the one Amy mentioned may become a selfish amusement, if it keeps us from adding a little to the general pleasure.”
“I never knew Dora take such a reading fit before,” muttered Lucius; “she generally likes to use her fingers more than her head.”
The remark was a very commonplace one, yet it added to Dora’s confusion. Mrs. Temple, noticing her daughter’s look of annoyance, though she attributed it to a different cause than the true one, turned the conversation by asking Agnes whether she had thought of a Scriptural type.
“Yes, mamma,” replied Agnes. “I believe that leprosy is a type of sin, and the cure of lepers a type of the cure of sin just as the looking up at the brazen serpent was a cure for the deadly bites.”
“You are perfectly right, my dear girl,” said her mother.
“What is leprosy?” asked little Elsie
“A dreadful kind of illness,” replied Agnes; and as she seemed disinclined to say more, perhaps from fear of bringing on her cough by speaking, her mother continued the description of this terrible type of sin.
“This frightful malady is still well-known in the East,” said Mrs. Temple. “Your uncle, who came lately from India, has told me that he has seen many poor lepers there. The leprosy makes them loathsome to the eye; it creeps over their bodies; it wastes their flesh; when it fastens on their hands, it will make the very fingers drop off!”
“Oh, how dreadful!” exclaimed all the children.