And she threw Priscilla's letter into the sea at high tide, torn into little bits. This was her second mistake.
This time this answer came:—
"PAINTED POST, June 21.
"MY DEAR LOST LAMB,—I have spent the night in prayer for you. This morning Agnes and Polly and I showed your profligate letter to our dear father. He has charged me to write what I think best to you.
"Is it not my business to care for the life and soul of a dear sister who has no mother's love? Am I not right when I fall on my knees to pray for her welfare? How could I enjoy the good of this life or the hopes of another, knowing that my sister is eating the bread of wickedness and drinking from the cup of sin? Shall the watchman desert his post because the soldier sleeps?
"Ask yourself why no person except the hireling tradesman ever visits at this house of luxury and extravagance, which your husband makes the prison-house of your soul.
"Ask yourself what is the fountain of this gold which he spends so shamelessly.
"Ask yourself, dear Psyche, what you would have said two years ago had any one told you that you should become the wife of a counterfeiter or a forger or a gambler or a keeper of a dance-house or a detective, or any other of those horrid things which are done in secret. If any one had said to you that you should have pleasure in those that do them, what would you have said? O my dear lost lamb, how often has that sweet text (see Romans i. 32) come back to me since I came to see you, in the faint hope that I might rescue my lamb even as a brand from the burning! My dear Psyche, will you not turn before it is too late? Why will you die?
"Thus asks and prays your own
"PRISCILLA."
"My own cat and dog!" said little Psyche scornfully. But she did not put the letter into the fire, nor did she tear it to shreds to throw them into the sea. I am very sorry; but, even in her wonder, she kept the letter hid away.