Miss Prudence Part 5

"Linnet! Linnet!" rebuked her mother, shutting the oven door, "I thought you were only playing. I wouldn't have let you go on if I had thought you would have taken it in earnest."

"I don't really," returned Linnet, with a vexed laugh, "but I did want to see what letter it would be."

"It's _O_," said Marjorie, turning to look over her shoulder.

"Rather a crooked one," conceded Linnet, "but it will have to do."

"Suppose you try a dozen times and they all come different," suggested practical Marjorie.

"That proves it's all nonsense," answered her mother.

"And suppose you don't marry anybody," Marjorie continued, spoiling Linnet's romance, "some letter, or something _like_ a letter has to come, and then what of it?"

"Oh, it's only fun," explained Linnet.

"I don't want to know about my _S_" confessed Marjorie. "I'd rather wait and find out. I want my life to be like a story-book and have surprises in the next chapter."

"It's sure to have that," said her mother. "We mustn't _try_ to find out what is hidden. We mustn't meddle with our lives, either. Hurry providence, as somebody says in a book."

"And we can't ask anybody but G.o.d," said Marjorie, "because n.o.body else knows. He could make any letter come that he wanted to."

"He will not tell us anything that way," returned her mother.

"I don't want him to," said Marjorie.

"Mother, I was in fun and you are making _serious_," cried Linnet with a distressed face.

"Not making it dreadful, only serious," smiled her mother.

"I don't see why the letter has to be about your husband," argued Marjorie, "lots of things will happen to us first"

"But that is exciting," said Linnet, "and it is the most of things in story-books."

"I don't see why," continued Marjorie, unconvinced, turning an apple around in her fingers, "isn't the other part of the story worth anything?"

"Worth anything!" repeated Linnet, puzzled.

"Doesn't G.o.d care for the other part?" questioned the child. "I've got to have a good deal of the other part."

"So have all unmarried people," said her mother, smiling at the quaint gravity of Marjorie's eyes.

"Then I don't see why--" said Marjorie.

"Perhaps you will by and by," her mother replied, laughing, for Marjorie was looking as wise as an owl; "and now, please hurry with the apples, for they must bake before tea. Mr. Woodfern says he never ate baked apple sauce anywhere else."

Marjorie hoped he would not stay a whole week, as he proposed, if she had to cut the apples. And then, with a shock and revulsion at herself, she remembered that her father had read at worship that morning something about giving even a cup of cold water to a disciple for Christ's sake.

Linnet laughed again as she stooped to pick up the doubtful _O_ and crooked _S_ from the oilcloth.

But the letters had given Marjorie something to think about.

I had decided to hasten over the story of Marjorie's childhood and bring her into her joyous and promising girlhood, but the child's own words about the "other part" that she must have a "good deal" of have changed my mind. Surely G.o.d does care for the "other part," too.

And I wonder what it is in you (do you know?) that inclines you to hurry along and skip a little now and then, that you may discover whether Marjorie ever married Hollis? Why can't you wait and take her life as patiently as she did?

That same Sat.u.r.day evening Marjorie's mother said to Marjorie's father, with a look of perplexity upon her face,

"Father, I don't know what to make of our Marjorie."

He was half dozing over the _Agriculturist_; he raised his head and asked sharply, "Why? What has she done now?"

Everybody knew that Marjorie was the apple of her father's eye.

"Nothing new! Only everything she does _is_ new. She is two Marjories, and that's what I can't make out. She is silent and she is talkative; she is shy, very shy, and she is as bold as a little lion; sometimes she won't tell you anything, and sometimes she tells you everything; sometimes I think she doesn't love me, and again she loves me to death; sometimes I think she isn't as bright as other girls, and then again I'm sure she is a genius. Now Linnet is always the same; I always know what she will do and say; but there's no telling about Marjorie. I don't know what to make of her," she sighed.

"Then I wouldn't try, wife," said Marjorie's father, with his shrewd smile. "I'd let somebody that knows."

After a while, Marjorie's mother spoke again:

"I don't know that you help me any."

"I don't know that I can; girls are mysteries--you were a mystery once yourself. Marjorie can respond, but she will not respond, unless she has some one to respond _to_, or some _thing_ to respond to. Towards myself I never find but one Marjorie!"

"That means that you always give her something to respond to!"

"Well, yes, something like it," he returned in one of Marjorie's contented tones.

"She'll have a good many heart aches before she's through, then," decided Mrs. West, with some sharpness.

"Probably," said Marjorie's father with the shadow of a smile on his thin lips.

III.

WHAT "DESULTORY" MEANS.

"A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded."

"Miss Prudence! O, Miss Prudence!"

It was summer time and Marjorie was almost fourteen years old. Her soul was looking out of troubled eyes to-day. Just now life was all one unanswered question.

"Marjorie! O, Marjorie!" mimicked Miss Prudence.

"I don't know what _desultory_ means," said Marjorie.