"Yes! 'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.'"
"I want to ask you something, dearie. Stoop your head down to me; I want to whisper. If you was to make a promise to somebody, and if it was a wicked promise that you had no business to have made, ought you to keep it?"
"Certainly not," said Marjorie. "It would be wrong to make a wicked promise, and it would also be wrong to keep it when you had made it."
"Do you think so, my dear? Are you sure?"
"Quite sure."
"Then listen, dearie, and I'll tell you. I feel as if I can't die till I do. I feel as if I must tell somebody. See? You know who Carrie is?"
"Yes; your daughter."
"Ay, and I wasn't half proud of her; a clever girl too, and such a scholar! Well, Carrie married a man as she met up in the North somewhere; and he was well-to-do and all that. I believe they had a very comfortable home, but he was awful mean to Carrie. He never would let her send anything to her poor old mother. I was nigh starved, my dear, I was indeed. If I hadn't raked in the ash-heaps, there's many a day I wouldn't have had a fire. I only had parish pay, see? And not too much of that. But one day they came to see me."
"Who did?"
"Her and her husband. And he spoke very fair, and he said if I would do a little thing for him, he'd allow me ten shillings a week as long as I lived. Well, my dear, I said I would do it, if I could. He wouldn't tell me what it was till I had promised I wouldn't tell anybody. And then he went to his hand-bag, and he brought out a tin box. It was just a common sort of box, like a small biscuit-box, and it had a bit of string tied tight round it.