In the meantime Prissy had sought the quiet of her own room, and drawn down the blind to shut out the sunshine, which seemed to mock her grief. Perhaps her conscience reproached her; it may be a still small voice whispered she had done wrong, had been selfish; but if so, she did not listen to it long, only bent her head on the table and cried bitterly.
Her Bible lay near, but she did not open it. She had not yet fully learned the comfort God's Word can give in sorrow. Prissy had been taught to reverence the Holy Scriptures as her father and mother did; to recognize God as the Creator and Upholder of the world, as an Almighty King, the Disposer of all events and the Ruler of the universe. But she rested there; not yet had she learned to know Jesus as a personal Saviour, nor God as a Father who cared for her and counted the very hairs of her head.
Only shortly before her death had even the amiable mother of the family learned to love the person of Christ. But that love once experienced, she had spoken words about Jesus to her children which had sunk deep into the hearts of some of them, and would one day bring forth fruit. On one of her last evenings on earth, she had spoken to the three oldest on the words "Thy kingdom come," expressing the earnest hope that they might each of them help on its coming.
It was Prissy who, with flashing eyes, said she would like to do so, adding it would be such a glorious work to be the means of elevating and bettering the world around her. In after days Priscilla remembered the unsatisfied look that crossed her mother's face as she spoke these words, and how she laid her hand caressingly on her shoulder, and was beginning to speak, when the door opened, and her father entering, the conversation dropped, and was not again resumed.
Professor Warner, one of the greatest mathematicians of his day, was a highly respected and in one sense a God-fearing man; but though fully recognizing the wonderful work of redemption, he had overlooked the need of love to the One who had redeemed him.
In family life, the doctor (for the honour of LL.D. had long been his) was reserved and deeply absorbed in his books. Domestic cares had entirely devolved on his wife, to whom he was fondly attached, though as a rule, he considered the whole female sex infinitely inferior to man.
And when the birth of his first child was announced to him, the expressive words, said with a sigh of disappointment, "Only a girl," was the sole remark he uttered.
"Only a girl!" repeated the incensed nurse. "As if a daughter in a house was not the best of blessings, better a hundred times than your great noisy boys. One would think the master was a heathen to speak like that, as if it was not through a woman that the greatest of all blessings descended to earth."
Despite nurse's indignation, the words "only a girl" became a sort of sobriquet to the little one; and when four boys followed in succession, and were warmly welcomed by their proud father, who prophesied great things of each one, whilst he might be said almost to overlook his first-born, friends and relations declared that, save to her loving mother, Priscilla Warner was indeed "only a girl."
A strangely quiet life she led, shut out as she was from all companionship with girls of her own age. Inheriting in no common degree her father's talents, Prissy, while still a child, became absorbed in studies, the nature of which even her mother was unaware of. For Mrs. Warner, busied with her children, husband, and household matters, superintending also many lesser details of her daughter's education, never knew that her spare hours were spent in the study of mathematics, for which she had a perfect passion.