For a perceptible time Bessie stood silent, save for her breathing, which was loud and rapid.
"Is it true? Really true?"
"Quite true."
There is something childlike in sudden joy; Paradise itself must be a place of children. Bessie dropped back on her bed, clasped her hands together like a child, and said,
"I see it all now, and it has been just as I thought at first. You wrote a letter to the King and he has pardoned me. The law is hard but the King is so tender-hearted. 'Poor girl,' he thought, 'she didn't mean to kill her baby—not after it came, anyway.'"
Her eyes, which had been glistening, suddenly became grave, and lifting them to the ceiling, with her hands clasped before her face, she began to pray.
"Oh God, I've not been a good girl and I don't know how to pray right, but...." and then came a flood of words too sacred to be set down.
When she had finished her prayer she said,
"But you have been good too, and I have been insulting you! That's the way with a girl when she has been in trouble. You'll forgive me, won't you?"
Her face lit up and she went on talking, more to herself than to Stowell.