“Well?” asked the old woman apprehensively.
“Will you please teach me something?” pleaded Pilarica.
“Ay, child, to be sure I will,” and the wrinkled hand drew, from a crack in a wondrously carven pedestal beside her, all the library the school possessed,—a dilapidated primer and a few loose leaves from a prayer-book.
The mistress pored over these dubiously for a while and then her look brightened.
“This is O,” she said impressively, “and that is M.”
“But you teach me O and M every time,” remonstrated Pilarica, “and never anything else. Indeed, I know O and M quite well now.”
The old dame cocked her red horns petulantly and thrust back her library into the marble crevice.
“O and M are very good learning,” she insisted. “Go back under the doorway and say your prayer and don’t come to school again to-day.”
So Pilarica, the corners of her mouth drooping just a little, knelt under the Gothic portal and repeated:
“Mother Most Holy,
Thy servant kneels to say
That with thy kind permission
It is time to play.
Mother Most Holy,
My loving heart implores,
Bless this little sinner
Before she runs outdoors.”