“We should not have had a model worth looking at had the embroidery been left to her,” said Dora to herself, not without a feeling of self-complacence, as she glanced at her twin who had again sunk into slumber.
It will be remembered that Dora had resolved to unpick all the work that she had sewn upon the preceding Sunday. As soon as the little girl had hastily finished her toilet, so hastily that she forgot to button her sleeves or put on her collar, she opened her workbox, took out her work, and seated herself as close to the window as possible, in order to catch as much as she could of the dim light of dawn. It might have been expected that Dora would also have forgotten to say her prayers, but such was not the case. She remembered to kneel down by her bedside and hurry through a mere form of words, without paying the slightest attention to their meaning, thinking of her embroidery all the time. It was a satisfaction to the conscience of Dora that she had repeated a prayer, and she never stopped to ask herself whether that prayer were not in itself a sin.
Dora with needle and scissors set first to her work of unpicking. But every one who has tried such an occupation must know it to be one of the most tedious and disagreeable of tasks. It was doubly so to Dora, because she greatly admired the embroidery work which she was thus beginning to spoil.
“It is a great pity to undo this,” Dora said to herself before she had been for two minutes plying the scissors. “I won’t go on with this foolish unpicking. After all, my undoing every stitch of my pretty work would not undo the fault of my having put it in on Sunday.”
This was indeed true. A fault once committed, no human being has power to undo; but while looking to the Lord alone for forgiveness, we are bound to prove the sincerity of our regret for a fault by making what amends lie in our power. Dora took the easier, but far more dangerous way, of trying to forget the fault altogether, or to make up for it by what she considered to be her zeal in charity work. She certainly sewed very diligently on that dull morning, scarcely lifting her eyes from the pattern which she had neatly traced on the linen. She was filling up the pencilled outlines with chain-stitch, satin-stitch, and other stitches, in bright-colored silks and a brilliant thread of gold.
“Oh, look!—just look how famously Dora has been getting on with her work!” exclaimed the admiring Elsie, when, summoned by the bell at half-past eight, the children had assembled in the breakfast-room, awaiting their mother’s coming down to prayers.
“Why, you don’t mean to say that you have worked all that this morning?” said Lucius to Dora.
The question was rather an awkward one for Dora to answer—it took the girl by surprise. Dora replied to it by an evasion, which was another act of deceit. “I couldn’t begin my embroidery on Saturday night,” she said, actually congratulating herself that she had this time spoken the exact truth, as if it were not the very essence of falsehood to deceive, even though the lips may utter no lie. As Dora had not sewn on Saturday, she knew that Lucius would take it for granted that she had been so clever and industrious as to do all the work which he saw on the Monday morning, for he would certainly never suspect her of having put in one stitch upon Sunday.
“Don’t you admire Dora’s curtain, is it not lovely?” said Amy to Agnes, who was examining the work of her twin.
“Rather,” was the reply, uttered in a hesitating tone.