"Ah, Adaly! I wish, child, that you could be more serious than you are."
"Serious! ha! ha!"—(she sees a look of pain on the face of the Doctor,) "but I will be,—I am"; and with great effort she throws a most unnatural expression of repose into her face.
"You are a good girl, Adaly; but this is not the seriousness I want to find in you. I want you to feel, my child, that you are walking on the brink of a precipice,—that your heart is desperately wicked."
"Oh, no, New Papa! you don't think I'm desperately wicked?"—and she says it with a charming eagerness of manner.
"Yes, desperately wicked, Adaly,—leaning to the things of this world, and not fastening your affections on things above, on the realities beyond the grave."
"But all that is so far away, New Papa!"
"Not so far as you think, child; they may come to-day."
Adèle is sobered in earnest now, and tosses her little feet back and forth, in an agony of apprehension.
The Doctor continues,—
"To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts"; and the sentiment and utterance are so like to the usual ones of the pulpit, that Adèle takes courage again.