halt come forth in the morning of the first resurrection, and no
power shall hinder except the shedding of innocent blood or the
consenting thereto. I seal thee up to eternal life in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen and amen!"

The worthy Bishop handed the paper back to the enraptured boy, and
turned to Joel Rae, who now came up.

"Hello, Brother Rae. I hear you took on that thirteenth woman of mine.
Much good it'll do you! She was unlucky for me, sure enough--
rambunctious when she was healthy, and lazy when she was sick!"

When they came out of the house half an hour later, he added in tones of
confidential warning:

"Say, you want to look out for her--I see she's getting the red back in
her blood!"

CHAPTER XXVI.

_How the Red Came Back to the Blood to be a Snare_

The watchful eyes of the Bishop had seen truly. Not only was the red
coming back to the blood of Martha, but the fair flesh to her meagre
frame, the spring of youth to her step and living fire to her voice and
the glance of her eyes. Her husband was pleased. He had made a new
creature of the poor, worn wreck found by the wayside, weak, emaciated,
reeling under her burden. He rejoiced to know he had done a true
service. He was glad, moreover, to know that she made an admirable
mother to the little woman-child. Prudence, indeed, had brought them
closer to each other, slowly, subtly, in little ways to disarm the most
timid caution.

And this mothering and fathering of little Prudence was a work by no
means colourless or uneventful. The child had displayed a grievous
capacity for remaining unimpressed by even the best-weighed opinions of
her protector. She was also appallingly fluent in and partial to the
idioms and metaphors of revealed religion,--a circumstance that would
not infrequently cause the sensitive to shudder.

Thus, when she chose to call her largest and least sightly doll the Holy
Ghost, the ingenuity of those about her was taxed to rebuke her in ways
that would be effective without being harsh. It was felt, too, that her
offence had been but slightly mitigated when she called the same doll,
thereafter, "Thou son of perdition and shedder of innocent blood." Not
until this disfigured effigy became Bishop Wright, and the remaining
dolls his more or less disobedient wives, was it felt that she had
approached even remotely the plausible and the decorous.

A glance at some of the verses she was from