And his voice choked a little, and his head went suddenly down on his arm.
"Well, now, I wouldn't mind, deary," spoke the old lady in soothing tones, after a few moments of silence. "If you didn't know anything about it, of course you wasn't to blame. 'Tisn't as if you had learned it in Sunday-school, and all that, and I wouldn't mind about the business. Like enough you'll have more days just as brisk as Sunday."
"It isn't that," Tode answered, disconsolately, lifting his head. "It's all them Sundays that I've been and wasted, when I might have gone to meeting. Been righter to go than to stay away, it seems; and it's thinking about lots of other things that's wrong maybe, just like this, and a fellow not knowing it."
And as he spoke he listlessly turned over the leaves of the old Bible, until his eye was arrested by the words, "Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel."
"That's exactly it," he told himself. "I've got to have a Bible. I'll get one little enough to go into my jacket pocket, and then, says I, we'll see if I can't find out about things. And after this I'm to shut up box and go to church, am I? Well, that's one good thing, anyhow."
Presently he and Jim climbed up to the little room over the kitchen. No sooner were they alone than Tode commenced on a subject that had puzzled him.
"I say, Jim, how comes it that you knew all about those things and never told me? That's treating a fellow pretty mean, I think. I always shared the peanuts and things I got with you."
"See here," answered Jim, in open-eyed wonder; "what are you driving at?"
"Why, things that you know and never told me. Here your mother has got a Bible, and you know verses in it, and know about heaven, and all, and you never told me a word."
Jim sat down on the foot of the bed and laughed, long and loud and merrily.