"Why, Zip, my dear child! Zip, don't be so headlong. I thought you were learning self-command. Why, how have you come? What is the meaning of all this?"
"Well, now they may kill me, if they like. I told them I would hear your voice again, and then they might skin me, if it suited them. I won't have their religion. There is none of it inside them. You are the only one I ever saw, that God has made with his eyes open. I like them very well, but what are they to you? Why, they won't let me speak as I was made! It is no good sending me away again. Parson, you mustn't stand up like that. Can't you see that I want to kiss you?"
"My dear little child, with all my heart. But I never saw any one half so——"
"Half so what? I don't care what, so long as I have got you round the neck," cried the child as she covered his face with kisses, drawing back every now and then, to look into his calm blue eyes with flashes of adoration. "The Lord should have made me your child, instead of that well-conducted waxy thing—look at my nails! She had better not come now."
"Alas! Have you cultivated nothing but your nails? But why did the good ladies send you home so soon? They said they would keep you until Whitsuntide."
"I got a punishment on purpose, and I let the old girls go to dinner. Then I said the Lord's Prayer, and slipped down the back stairs."
"And you plodded more than twenty miles alone! Oh Zip, what a difficult thing it will be to guide you into the ways of peace!"
"They say I talks broad a bit still sometimes, and they gives me ever so much roilying. But I'd sit up all night with a cork in my mouth, if so be, I could plaize 'e, Parson."
"You must want something better than a cork, my dear"—vexed as he was, Mr. Penniloe admired the vigorous growth and high spirit of the child—"after twenty-two miles of our up and down roads. Now go to Mrs. Muggridge, but remember one thing—if you are unkind to my little Fay, how can you expect me to be kind to you?"