“There’s no reform in him,” her aunt replied. “I know Jack Percy,—a bad egg when he was a boy, and a worse one now he is a man, I dare say, though I haven’t known much of him lately. Such as he can’t reform.”
“He must be pretty bad, then,” Elithe said, thinking of Mr. Pennington as he was in the miners’ camp and as he was when she saw him last.
She spoke of him to her aunt, who asked when she had finished, “Is he anything to you?”
“To me? No; nothing but a friend. We all liked him. We couldn’t help it,” was Elithe’s answer, given with no change of voice or color.
She was untouched; but Miss Hansford was not so sure of the man. He could not be insensible to Elithe’s beauty,—no man could. It had impressed Paul, engaged though he was; it must have impressed Mr. Pennington, who might appear on the scene at any moment, and Miss Hansford’s bones began to tell her that trouble would come from Elithe’s reformed friend. She was studying Elithe carefully, and as yet could find no fault with her. She neither sang, nor whistled, nor slatted her things; she was so helpful about the house, so sunny and bright and willing that her aunt wondered how she had ever lived without her, and began to dread the time when she would be gone. There was no Potter blood in her, she decided, unless it were manifest in the flower-like beauty of her face and the supple grace of her figure. So much she conceded to the Potters. For the rest Elithe was all Hansford.
“I hain’t an atom of fault to find with her, nor her bringin’ up,” she said to a neighbor. “Nothing at all, except that she’s never read the Bible through, and she a minister’s daughter. But what can you expect of a ’Piscopal who puts the Prayer Book before everything. She knows that about by heart, same as I did once.”
Reading the Bible through was one of Miss Hansford’s tests of religious training, and she had learned with surprise that Elithe was remiss in this respect.
“Never read the Bible through! My soul! What’s your father been thinking about?” she said, when Elithe confessed her shortcoming. “Why, I’d read it through before I was a dozen years old,—five chapters every Sunday and three every week day will do it in a year.”
Then she began to question Elithe’s knowledge of the Scriptures, finding that she neither knew how old Adam was when he died, nor how old he was when Seth was born. Ages were Miss Hansford’s specialty, and she could give you the birthdays at once of most of the noted people in the Bible and the date of their death.
“I suppose you know your catechism from A to izzard,” she suggested to Elithe, who replied, “No, I don’t. I never could manage the long answer about my duty to God and my neighbor. Heathenish, I know, and if you say so I’ll learn them at once. Any way, I’ll begin the three chapters in the Bible to-day, and will soon catch up with the old fellows’ ages.”