"May the Lord open his heart to love you in return, sweet bairnie," sighed the good woman. "But not to take you frae me," she added mentally.
The child pleaded for "stories 'bout mamma; Elsie's mamma when she was little girlie, and played wis her little brothers and sisters."
Mrs. Murray having been housekeeper at Viamede for nearly twenty years, had a plentiful store of these laid up in her memory. Each one had been repeated for the little girl's entertainment a score of times or more, but repetition seemed to have no power to lessen their interest for her.
"Why doesn't Elsie have brothers and sisters?" she asked during a pause in the narration. "Elsie do want some so bad!"
"Our Father didna see fit to give you any, dear bairn; and so you must try to be content without," Mrs. Murray answered, with a tender caress; "we canna have all we would like in this world; but when we get home where the dear Lord Jesus is, we'll have nothing left to wish for; our cup o' joy will be full to overflowing. Now bid me good-night, my wee bonnie, bonnie darling, for here's mammy come to take you to bed."
The child complied with alacrity. She and her mammy were devotedly attached to each other, and had seldom been apart for an hour since the little girl first saw the light.
And the nurse, though wholly uneducated, was as simple-hearted and earnest a Christian as Mrs. Murray herself, and faithfully carried out the dying injunction of the young mother, to try to teach her little one, from her earliest years, to love and fear the Lord.
She talked and sang to her of Jesus before she was a year old, and as soon as she began to speak, taught her to kneel night and morning with folded hands and lisp her little prayer. And she, too, told her sweet stories of the mother she had never known, of the beautiful home whither she had gone, of the loving Saviour who was with her there, and also on earth watching over her darling.
Every night she rocked her to sleep in her arms, soothing her to rest with these ever new stories, and the sweet wild melodies common among her race.