“How should it be lonely?” she said. “It is home. It is the only place where we could live. Some people wanted us to come and live in the village, after mother died. We’d sooner have died, too, both of us. Wouldn’t we, Jacob?”
“Is there no one belonging to you? it seems too—”
“Too dreadful,” the preacher would have said, but something seemed to hold back the words. Perhaps it was the perfect quiet in the two faces.
“Of course I miss Giles, all the time,” Isla went on, presently. “But he was so tired, poor dear, that he could not stay any longer.”
“And your mother?” said the preacher, with some reproach in her tone. “Do you not miss your mother?”
“Jacob did!” said Isla. “Or he would have, at first, if I had let him. But mother,—oh, you could not have kept her. She hated it so, after Giles was gone, she had to go, too. No, we are much better off without mother; she could not bear me after Giles went, and hardly she could bear Jacob; and she tried so hard to die, I was glad when she could. She was dumb, too, you know, and now she isn’t, I suppose.”
This was strange talk. The preacher felt that she should reprove and exhort, but still the girl’s face silenced her.
“Tell me, Isla,” she said, after a silence, “what did you mean, when you said, a little while ago, that I had said some things that were not true. You did not mean that, I am sure.”
Isla reflected.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, surely I meant it. You spoke of Him,”—she nodded upward with her curious reverent gesture,—“you said He was our Father; I liked that. Giles knew a little, but he did not know that much, then. Now I suppose he does. But then you said that if we did things,—I don’t remember what things,—that He would be angry with us always, and never love us any more, and that we should be punished all the time, forever. And that could not be true, because it is nonsense.”