“Has he got a share in it, too?” asked Carolyn May.
“I think we all should have,” said the minister, looking down at her with returning kindliness in his glance. “Even little girls like you.”
Carolyn May looked at him quite seriously.
“Do you s’pose,” she asked him confidentially, “that Satan is really wicked enough to trouble little girls?”
It was a startling bit of new philosophy thus suggested, and Mr. Driggs shook his head in grave doubt. But it gave him something to think of all that day; and the first sermon preached in The Corners church that autumn seemed rather different from most of those solid, indigestible discourses that the good man was wont to drone out to his parishioners.
“Dunno but it is worth while to give the parson a vacation,” pronounced Uncle Joe at the dinner table. “Seems to me, his sermon this morning seemed to have a new snap to it. Mebbe he’ll give old Satan a hard rub this winter, after all.”
“Joseph Stagg!” said Aunty Rose admonishingly.
“I think he’s a very nice man,” said Carolyn May suddenly. “And I kep’ awake most of the time—you see, I heard poor Princey howling for me here, where he was tied up.”
“Hum!” ejaculated Mr. Stagg. “Which kept you awake—the dog or the minister?”
“Oh, I like Mr. Driggs very much,” the little girl assured him. “And he’s in great ’fliction, too, I am sure. He—he wears crêpe on his hat and sleeve.”