“Sit down, Marie,” said he. “I wish your name was Fanny, I don’t like fancy names and flummery.”
“I was named for my mother, Frances Maria,” said she, in the sweetest and softest voice that Evans remembered ever to have heard. Her voice penetrated his heart—and then her name was Fanny. He had always cherished a cordial friendship and a true respect for her mother—and he wished the girl to bear her mother’s name.
“I would like very much to be called Fanny,” said the child.
“Well, then, Fanny, how do you like your new home?”
“I am very glad of it,” said Fanny, and the tears filled her eyes.
“Don’t cry—there’s a good girl. Do you wish to go to school?”
“I don’t know how I would like school. My dear mother always taught me.”
“Well, you must go and see how you will get on. You will be a good girl, I dare say. You will obey Mrs. Evans in all she asks of you. If you want any thing, come to me. You will call me Cousin Charles when you speak to me, and Mr. Evans when you speak of me. When you speak to Mrs. E. call her aunty, and Mrs. Evans when you speak of her.”
And thus little Fanny began her life at her cousin’s comfortable home. When she was told of her father’s death, she shuddered and felt relieved. Fanny loved her mother as we always love when we have few objects for our affections to rest on. But with the blessed faith of a child and a Christian, she believed she was now in heaven, where she would be perfectly happy forever, and she became strangely happy in her new home. All her studies and occupations were so many changing joys. From morning till night she was like some bright bird that knew not where to bestow the fullness of its brilliant and merry carolings. Everybody saw as the months passed away, how she wound herself around the heart of Charles Evans; and the friends began to prophesy that he would adopt her as his child, and make her his heir.
Mrs. Evans was a woman of great goodness, very old, and very pious. She had now but one wish ungratified, and that was that Charles Evans and his ward should be converted. This seemed a hard matter to accomplish as far as Evans was concerned. He was rather a hopeless subject, for he boasted that he was a temperance man, that he never drank any thing stronger than black tea, that he never chewed tobacco, took laughing gas, or went to a protracted meeting.