At that Mrs. Wiley released the girl, who threw herself, trembling and sobbing, on a lounge.
Bangs glanced at her half pityingly, half contemptuously; then turning to his sister, “Were you going out?” he asked. “I see you have on your bonnet and shawl.”
“No; I’ve just come home from church; where, by the way, you ought to have been with me.”
“Not I, indeed,” he returned, sneeringly. “I have no religious character to keep up; never made any pretensions in that line; one saint in the family is sufficient—especially of the kind I’m most familiar with.”
“I fully understand your insinuations,” she said, her eyes flashing with anger; “but I shall do my duty by Mary, nevertheless. I must help her to conquer that dreadful temper of hers.”
“‘Example is better than precept,’” he quoted, significantly; “but what particular exhibition of temper had she given to entitle her to so thorough a flogging?—a punishment, by the way, rather unsuited, in my humble opinion, to a girl of her years.”
“It’s the only thing that has any effect,” Mrs. Wiley asserted, with decision. “I reproved her for mislaying her gloves (she had laid them on the table in the parlor instead of carrying them up to her room and putting them in their proper place), and you should have seen the scowl she gave me when I spoke to her about it.”
“Well, well, enough said, Dora; though it strikes me that if I professed to be a saint, and had just come home from church, I’d feel called upon to exercise some patience with the faults and follies of youth. But come into my private office, for, as I said, I want a little talk with you on a matter of business.”
Having led the way, and seen her dumpy figure comfortably ensconced in the large, leather-cushioned arm-chair, which usually held his own spare person, he opened the conference with an abrupt query.
“You are intimately acquainted at Lakeside, are you not? and esteemed there as a burning and shining light in the church?”