"No," answered Lucy, "but I will find out to-morrow, and ask him to come and see you."
"Well, that will be nice," returned Mattie. "Read to me, Mr. Spelt—anything you like."
The little tailor was very shy of reading before Lucy, but Mattie would hear of nothing else, for she would neither allow Lucy to read, nor yet to go away.
"Don't mind me, Mr. Spelt," said Lucy, beseechingly. "We are all friends, you know. If we belong to the Somebody Mattie speaks about we needn't be shy of each other."
Thus encouraged, Mr. Spelt could refuse no longer. He read about the daughter of Jairus being made alive again.
"Oh, dear me!" said Mattie. "And if I had gone dead when Syne was tormenting of me, He could have come into the room, and taken me by the hand and said, 'Daughter, get up.' How strange it would be if He said, 'Daughter' to me, for then He would be my father, you know. And they say He's a king. I wonder if that's why Mr. Kitely calls me princess. To have Mr. Kitely and Somebody," she went on musingly, "both for fathers is more than I can understand. There's something about godfathers and godmothers in the Catechism, ain't there, Miss Burton?" Then, without, waiting for a reply, she went on, "I wish my father would go and hear what that nice gentleman—not Mr. Potter—has got to say about it. Miss Burton, read the hymn about blind Bartimeus, and that'll do mother good, and then I'll go to sleep."
The next day, after she came from the Morgensterns', Lucy went to find Mr. Fuller. She had been to the week-evening service twice since Mattie began to recover, but she had no idea where Mr. Fuller lived, and the only way she could think of for finding him was to ask at the warehouses about the church. She tried one after another, but nobody even knew that there was any service there—not to say where the evening preacher lived. With its closed, tomb-like doors, and the utter ignorance of its concerns manifested by the people of the neighborhood, the great ugly building stood like some mausoleum built in honor of a custom buried beneath it, a monument of the time when men could buy and sell and worship God. So Lucy put off further inquiry till the next week-evening service, for she had found already that Mr. Fuller had nothing to do with the Sunday services in that church.
How she wished that she could take Thomas with her the next time she went to receive Mr. Fuller's teaching! She had seen very little of Thomas, as I have said, and had been so much occupied with Mattie, that she did not even know whether he had fulfilled his promise about telling his father. I suspect, however, that she had been afraid to ask him, foreboding the truth that he had in fact let his promise lapse in time, and was yet no nearer toward its half redemption in act, which was all that remained possible now. And, alas! what likelihood was there of the good seed taking good root in a heart where there was so little earth?
Finding Mr. Kitely in his shop door, Lucy stopped to ask after Mattie, for she had not seen her that morning. And then she told him what she had been about, and her want of success.
"What does the child want a clergyman for?" asked Mr. Kitely, with some tone of dissatisfaction. "I'm sure you're better than the whole lot of them, miss. Now I could listen to you—"