Several times she heard sleighs driving along, the bells ringing merrily and loud, and she thought they were going to stop—but they flew swiftly by. She felt as the mariner feels on a desert island, when he spies a distant sail, and tries in vain to arrest the vessel, that glides on, unheeding his signal of distress.
“I will say my prayers,” she said, “if I have no bed to lie down on. If God ever heard me, He will listen now, for I’ve nobody but Him to go to.”
Kneeling down in the darkness, and folding her hands reverently, while she lifted them upwards, she softly repeated the prayer her mother had taught her, and, for the first time, the spirit of it entered her understanding. When she came to the words—“Give us this day our daily bread,” she paused. “Thou hast given it,” she added, “and oh! God, I thank Thee.” When she repeated—“Forgive my sins,” she thought of the sin, for which she was suffering so dreadful a punishment. She had sinned in disobeying so kind a teacher. She ought to study, instead of thinking of far-off things. She did not wonder the master was angry with her. It was her own fault, for he had told her what he was going to do with her; and if she had not been idle, she might have been at home by a warm fire, safe in a father’s sheltering arms. For the first time she added something original and spontaneous to the ritual she had learned. When she had finished the beautiful and sublime doxology, she bowed her head still lower, and repeated, in accents trembling with penitence and humility—
“Only take care of me to-night, our Father who art in heaven, and I will try and sin no more.”
Was she indeed left forgotten there, till morning’s dawn?
When Master Hightower bent his steps homeward, he was solving a peripatetic problem of Euclid. When he arrived at his lodgings, seated himself by the blazing fire, and stretched out his massy limbs to meet the genial heat, in the luxurious comfort he enjoyed, the cares, the bustle, the events of the day were forgotten. A smoking supper made him still more luxuriously comfortable, and a deeper oblivion stole over him. It was not likely that the fragrant cigar he then lighted as the crowning blessing of the evening, would recall to his mind the fireless, supperless, comfortless culprit he had left in such “durance vile.” Combing his hair suddenly with the fingers of his left hand, and leaning back in a floating position, he watched the smoke-rings, curling above his head, and fell into a reverie on Natural Philosophy. He was interrupted by the entrance of Arthur Hazleton, the young doctor.
“I called for the new work on Chemistry, which I lent you some time since,” said Arthur. “Is it perfectly convenient for you to let me have it now?”
“I am very sorry,” replied the master, “I left it in the school-room, in my desk.”
His desk! yes! and he had left something else there too.
“I will go and get it,” he cried, starting up, suddenly, his face reddening to his temples. “I will get it, and carry it over to you.”