The only member of the family who knew her secret was Austin; and boy though he was, he had been her first instructor in the rudiments of the science in which he as well as his brother Lewis were daily instructed by their father.
"Why not let me tell father you like these sort of things, Prissy?" he said one day.
But she implored him not to do so, having often heard her father express contempt for women bungling away at matters they could never properly understand.
"No, no," he said; "let a woman be a good housekeeper, and if she can read intelligibly, write plainly, keep a few accounts correctly, make shirts properly, and, if she likes, play on the piano or the guitar, and sing, that is all that can be expected of her. A woman has not brains for higher things."
At such a speech, child though she was, Prissy would flush up with indignation, and determine that one day she would prove to her father what a woman could do. To become famous, to do some grand work on earth, this was the girl's ambition, this the only secret she had kept from her loving mother. The day would come when she would constrain the father (whose praise she esteemed more than aught on earth, and for whose love she yearned) to own that she was something more than "only a girl."
But since the death of her mother, all ambitious thoughts had left the girl's head. She was stunned, and had scarcely even gone to the nursery to look at the little infant sleeping in the pretty cot prepared for her by the hands of the mother who had lived but to clasp her to her heart and give her a dying blessing. A sudden low cry from the room next hers now aroused Prissy, and lifting her head she listened. It was the baby, and she remembered with a pang of reproach, that that day she had never even asked after the child.
Ere doing so, she opened the Bible, her mother's last gift to her on her fifteenth birthday, just one fortnight ago. She turned to the page on which her name was written, and read below it the words, "Thy kingdom come," and these other words, "To every man his work."
"Yes," she said, and raised her head confidently as she spoke, "I have a work to do; and I will do it, and make my father proud of me yet. And how about the kingdom of God?"
She hesitated, then said, "Well, of course, if I study earnestly, I will be able to teach others, and thus elevate the thoughts of many, and so, by bettering the world, hasten on the coming of God's kingdom. Yes; that would be one way of doing it, I think so, surely. But I wonder what Austin would say? Mamma's words about the kingdom seemed to impress him so much, although he said little. I am sure that some way or other Austin will help on the kingdom of God; and so, I am determined, shall I. One thing is plain—I must no longer waste my time."
And forgetting her determination of going into the nursery, she went to the window, pulled up the blind, and taking down her slate and books was soon deep in solving some, to her, new and interesting mathematical problems.