"Come, sit on my knee, as your dear mamma used to do at your age," he said, "and tell me what you have been doing these past weeks while I have seen so little of you."
"It is so nice," she said as she took the offered seat, and he passed his arm about her, "so nice to have a grandpa to pet me; especially when I've no father or mother at home to do it."
"So we are mutually satisfied," he said. "Now what have you to tell me? any questions to ask? any doubts or perplexities to be cleared away?"
"Grandpa, has anybody been telling you anything?" she asked.
"No, nothing about you."
"Then I'll just tell you all." And she gave him a history of Isadore's efforts to pervert her, and their effect upon her; also of the conversation of that afternoon, in which Mr. Daly had answered the questions of Isadore, that had most perplexed and troubled her.
Mr. Dinsmore was grieved and distressed by Isa's defection from the evangelical faith, and indignant at her attempt to lead Vi astray also.
"Are you fully satisfied now on all the points?" he asked.
"There are one or two things I should like to ask you about, grandpa," she said. "Isa thinks a convent life so beautiful and holy, so shut out from the world, with all its cares and wickedness, she says; so quiet and peaceful, so full of devotion and the self-denial the Lord Jesus taught when he said, 'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.'
"Do you think leaving one's dear home and father and mother, and brothers and sisters to be shut up for life with strangers, in a convent, was the cross he meant, grandpa?"