He stopped, as if somebody had touched him. His head drooped, his arms dropped by his side, and he flushed scarlet from throat to forehead. He stood so for several minutes, no one stirring; then he turned humbly to Jacob Bailey.
"I ask your pardon, sir, and the company's. I lost holt of myself. There! I am fairly ashamed." He leaned over the poor old sinner, who was still gasping from the sudden onslaught. "Hurt you, did I, Old Man? I ask your pardon, too, I do so. Lemme h'ist you a mite!"
With anxious care he raised the shrunken figure and settled the pillows under the palsied head.
"There! That comfy, old geezer? Now you go to sleep! I was a mutt to shake you up that way. Goo' night, Old Man!"
Sitting on his neat bed an hour later, Pippin dealt with himself, as judge with criminal. His vivid fancy saw himself as two distinct beings, one arraigning, the other replying. He desired to know whether he, Pippin, thought he was all creation? Because if so, he took leave to tell him he wasn't, nor anything approachin' it. Reassured on this point, he further observed that perhaps on the whole it might be best for him to go back to Shoreham. Most likely he wasn't prepared yet to live among Christian folks; say he was to go back for another year till he'd learned to hold his tongue and keep his temper! How would he like that?
"Well, then, you behave! If you're a Christian, show up, that's what I say. What was it you promised Elder Hadley? To look for the grace of God in every one you see, wasn't it? Well, then! Did you look for it in Old Man Blossom?"
"Why, sure! Didn't I sing, and pray, and all? I couldn't find no grace, not a mite, so help me!"
Silence; the outward man sitting with bent head and knotted brows, the inner—both of him—wrestling with a problem. At last the brows cleared, the head lifted.
"Bonehead!" said Pippin. "You didn't look in the right place. Prayin' an' singin' wasn't his kind, no more than they were a dumb critter's. Didn't he want his little gal, want her real bad? Wasn't that mebbe the way grace took him? I expect the Lord has as many ways as there is folks."