“Ay, you have no time to lose,” responded Sister Joan.
Dorothy found Mr Ewring waiting for her at the end of the lane.
“Have you had to eat, Dorothy?” was his first question when she had climbed up beside him.
“Never a bite or sup in that house, Master, I thank you,” was Dorothy’s rejoinder. “If I’d been starving o’ hunger, I wouldn’t have touched a thing.”
“Have you seen the children?”
“I’ve seen Cissy. That was enough and to spare.”
“What do they with her?”
“They are working hard with both hands to make an angel of her at the soonest—that’s what they are doing. It’s not what they mean to do. They want to make her a devil, or one of the devil’s children, which comes to the same thing: but the Lord ’ll not suffer that, or I’m a mistaken woman. They are trying to bend her, and they never will. She’ll break first. So they’ll break her, and then there’ll be no more they can do. That’s about where it is, Master Ewring.”
“Why, Dorothy, I never saw you thus stirred aforetime.”
“Maybe not. It takes a bit to stir me, but I’ve got it this even, I can tell you.”