“Could she not say one word, Aunt?”
“Yes, she could say three. Verily, sometimes I marvelled if she might not have been taught more; but we knew not how, and how she got hold of those three we could never tell.”
“What were they?”
“They were, ‘up,’ ‘who,’ and ‘poor.’”
“Well, she could not do much with those.”
“Could she not! ‘Who’ asked all her questions. It answered for who, what, where, when, how, and why. She went on saying it until we understood and replied to the sense in which she meant it. ‘Poor’ was the word of emotion; it signified ‘I pity you,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I am sorry,’ and ‘Forgive me.’ And sometimes it meant, ‘Forgive him,’ or ‘Don’t you feel sorry for her?’ And I think ‘up’ served for everything else.”
“Aunt,” said Bertha softly, “how did you teach the little Lady to pray? She could tell her beads, I suppose; but would she know what they meant?”
For Bertha, like everybody else at that time, thought it necessary to keep count of her prayers. Prayer, in her eyes, was not so much communion with God, as it was a kind of charm which in some unaccountable way brought you good luck.
“Beads would have meant nothing to her but toys,” was Avice’s reply. “The Lady de la Mothe taught her the holy sign”—by which Avice meant the cross—“and led her to the image of blessed Mary, that she might do it before her. But I do not think she ever properly understood that She seemed only to have an idea that it was something she must do when she saw an image; and she did it to the statue of the Lady Queen in the great hall. We could not make her understand that one image was not the same thing as another image. But I fancy she had some idea—strange and dim it might be—of what we meant when we knelt and put our hands together and looked up. I know she did it very often, without telling—always at night, before she slept. But it was strange that she never went to the holy images at that time; she always seemed to go away from them, and kneel down in a corner. And in her last illness, several times, coming into the chamber, I found her lying with her hands folded in prayer, and her eyes lifted up to Heaven. Perhaps God Himself told her how to speak to Him. One of the strangest things of all was when the little Lord William died; she was nearly three years old then. She had been very fond of her little brother; he was nearest her age of all her brothers and sisters, though he was almost four years older than herself. She came to me sobbing bitterly, and with her little cry of ‘Who? who?’ I took it to mean ‘What has happened to him?’ and I was completely puzzled how to explain it to her. But all at once, while I was beating my brains to think what I could say that would make her comprehend it, she told me herself what I could not tell her. Making the sign for the little Lord who was dead, she laid her head
