"Five years old," repeated Coomber; "but she'd talk if she was as old as that, and Dame Peters told me she'd just laid like a dead thing ever since she'd been there."
"She's ill, that's what it is, poor little mite—ill and frightened out of her senses;" and Mrs. Coomber gathered her in her arms, and kissed the little white lips, and pressed her to her bosom, as only a tender mother can, while the boys stood round in wondering silence, and Coomber dashed a tear from his eye as he thought of the little daughter lying in Fellness churchyard. But he was ashamed of the love that prompted this feeling, and said hastily: "Now, mother, we mustn't begin by spoiling her;" but then he turned away, and called Bob to go with him and look after the boat.
For several days the child continued very ill—too ill to notice anything, or to attempt to talk; but one day, when she was lying on Mrs. Coomber's lap before the fire, the boys mutely looking at her as she lay, she suddenly put up her little hands, and said in a feeble whisper, "Dear faver Dod, tate tare o' daddy and mammy, and Tiny;" and then she seemed to drop off into a doze.
The boys were startled, and Mrs. Coomber looked down hastily at the little form on her lap, for this was the first intimation they had had that the child could talk, although Mrs. Coomber fancied that she had showed some signs of recognising her during the previous day.
"I say, did you hear that?" whispered Dick. "Was she saying her prayers, mother, like Harry Hayes does?"
Mrs. Coomber nodded, while she looked down into the child's face and moved her gently to and fro to soothe her to sleep.
"But, mother, ought she to say that? Did you hear her? She said 'dear God,'" said Dick, creeping round to his mother's side.
Mrs. Coomber was puzzled herself at the child's words. They had awakened in her a far-off memory of days when she was a girl, and knelt at her mother's knee, and said, "Our Father," before she went to bed. But that was long before she had heard of Bermuda Point, or thought of having boys and girls of her own. When they came she had forgotten all about those early days; and so they had never been taught to say their prayers, or anything else, in fact, except to help their father with the boat, shoot wild-fowl in the winter, and gather samphire on the shore during the summer.
She thought of this now, and half wished she had thought of it before. Perhaps if she had tried to teach her children to pray, they would have been more of a comfort to her. Perhaps Jack, her eldest, would not have run away from home as he did, leaving them for years to wonder whether he was alive or dead, but sending no word to comfort them.
The boys were almost as perplexed as their mother. The little they had heard of God filled them with terror, and so to hear such a prayer as this was something so startling that they could think and talk of nothing else until their father came in, when, as usual, silence fell on the whole family, for Coomber was in a sullen mood now.