“You look as if you lived in some of the fine, big houses. I’d like to go in wan. An’ you know so much! You must have been to school a good deal. Oh, how soft your hands are!”
She laughed delightedly as she enclosed one in both of hers, and then pressed it to her cheek.
He stooped and kissed her. No one ever did that but Dil and Patsey.
“You’ll surely come back in time to go to heaven, soon as it’s pleasant weather,” she said suddenly. “An’ Dil couldn’t be leaved behind. Mother threatens to put her in a shop, an’ she does bang her head cruel. But I wouldn’t want to be in a pallis an’ have everything, if I couldn’t have Dil. An’ you’ll get it all fixed so’s we can go?”
Ah, ah! before that time Bess would have been folded in the everlasting arms. There was a lump in his throat, and he began to untie the string of the book to evade a more decisive answer.
It was an illustrated edition, simplified for children’s reading. He turned some of the leaves and found one picture—Christiana ascending the palace steps amid a host of angels.
From this squalid place and poverty, to that—how could he explain the steps between? When he came back Bess would be gone—
“Past night, past day,”
and he would give Dil a new and better chance in spite of her mother.
Dil drew a long, long breath.