The Voice | Page 9

making pastoral calls. "And I--I, unworthy as I was!" Henry Roberts
would say, "I heard the Voice, speaking through a sister's lips; and it
said: Oh, sinner! for what, for what, what can separate, separate, from
the love... Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing. Oh, nothing." He would stare at Dr.
Lavendar with parted lips. "I HEARD IT," he would say, in a whisper.
And Dr. Lavendar, bending his head gravely, would be silent for a
respectful moment, and then he would look at Philippa. "You are
teaching Fenn's sister to sew?" he would say. "Very nice! Very nice!"
Philly saw a good deal of the sister that summer; the young minister,
recognizing Miss Philippa's fondness for Mary, and remembering a text
as to the leading of a child, took pains to bring the little girl to Henry
Roberts's door once or twice a week; and as August burned away into
September Philippa's pleasure in her was like a soft wind blowing on
the embers of her heart and kindling a flame for which she knew no
name. She thought constantly of Mary, and had many small anxieties
about her-- her dress, her manners, her health; she even took the child
into Old Chester one day to get William King to pull a little loose white
tooth. Philly shook very much during the operation and mingled her
tears with Mary's in that empty and bleeding moment that follows the
loss of a tooth. She was so passionately tender with the little girl that
the doctor told Dr. Lavendar that his match-making scheme seemed
likely to prosper--"she's so fond of the sister, you should have heard her

sympathize with the little thing!--that I think she will smile on the
brother," he said.
"I'm afraid the brother hasn't cut his wisdom teeth yet," Dr. Lavendar
said, doubtfully; "if he had, you might pull them, and she could
sympathize with him; then it would all arrange itself. Well, he's a nice
boy, a nice boy;-- and he won't know so much when he gets a little
older."
It was on the way home from Dr. King's that Philippa's feeling of
responsibility about Mary brought her a sudden temptation. They were
walking hand in hand along the road. The leaves on the mottled
branches of the sycamores were thinning now, and the sunshine fell
warm upon the two young things, who were still a little shaken from
the frightful experience of tooth-pulling. The doctor had put the small
white tooth in a box and gravely presented it to Mary, and now, as they
walked along, she stopped sometimes to examine it and say, proudly,
how she had "bleeded and bleeded!"
"Will you tell brother the doctor said I behaved better than the circus
lion when his tooth was pulled?"
"Indeed I will, Mary!"
"An' he said he'd rather pull my tooth than a lion's tooth?"
"Of course I'll tell him."
"Miss Philly, shall I dream of my tooth, do you suppose?"
Philippa laughed and said she didn't know.
"I hope I will; it means something nice. I forget what, now."
"Dreams don't mean anything, Mary."
"Oh yes, they do!" the child assured her, skipping along with one arm
round the girl's slender waist. "Mrs. Semple has a dream-book, and she
reads it to me every day, an' she reads me what my dreams mean.

Sometimes I haven't any dreams," Mary admitted, regretfully, "but she
reads all the same. Did you ever dream about a black ox walking on its
back legs? I never did. I don't want to. It means trouble."
"Goosey!" said Miss Philippa.
"If you dream of the moon," Mary went on, happily, "it means you are
going to have a beau who'll love you."
"Little girls mustn't talk about love," Philippa said, gravely; but the
color came suddenly into her face. To dream of the moon means--Why!
but only the night before she had dreamed that she had been walking in
the fields and had seen the moon rise over shocks of corn that stood
against the sky like the plumed heads of Indian warriors! "Such things
are foolish, Mary," Miss Philly said, her cheeks very pink. And while
Mary chattered on about Mrs. Semple's book Philippa was silent,
remembering how yellow the great flat disk of the moon had been in
her dream; how it pushed up from behind the black edge of the world,
and how, suddenly, the misty stubble-field was flooded with its strange
light:--"you are going to have a beau!"
Philippa wished she might see the book, just to know what sort of
things were read to Mary. "It isn't right to read them to the child," she
thought; "it's a foolish book, Mary," she said, aloud. "I never saw such
a book."
"I'll bring it the next time I come,"