'Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back '—
"Missy don't agree with her fellow-countryman, eh?"
His eye held a twinkle of mischief.
"He isn't my fellow-countryman!" Corona protested vehemently. "I'm English—amn't I, Daddy?"
"There, there—forgive me, little one! And you really don't want to leave us, just yet?"
"Leave you?" The child took Brother Bonaday's hand and hugged it close. "Uncle Copas, if you won't laugh I want to tell you something—what they call confessing." She hesitated for a moment. "Haven't you ever felt you've got something inside, and how awful good it is to confess and get it off your chest?"
Brother Copas gave a start, and eyed his fellow-Protestant.
"Well?" he said after a pause.
"Well, it's this way," confessed Corona. "I can't say my prayers yet in this place—not to get any heft on them; and that makes me feel bad, you know. I start along with 'Our Father, which art in heaven,' and it's like calling up a person on the 'phone when he's close at your elbow all the time. Then I say 'God bless St. Hospital,' and there I'm stuck; it don't seem I want to worry God to oblige beyond that. So I fetch back and start telling how glad I am to be home—as if God didn't know—and that bats me up to St. Hospital again. I got stone-walled that way five times last night. What's the sense of asking to go to heaven when you don't particularly want to?"
"Child," Brother Copas answered, "keep as honest as that and peg away. You'll find your prayers straighten themselves out all right."