Page:A Nameless Nobleman.djvu/71

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MOLLY.
59

christened in the parish church where her forbears had been for centuries before she was born, and should be educated as they had been in catechism and church-service.

Deborah submitted simply because she couldn't help it: but she wrung from the conqueror a reluctant consent to join a party of emigrants about leaving Old England for New; for, as she pathetically remarked,—

"She could better bear her disgrace in the wilderness than among her own folk."

"If it's disgrace to wed an honest man, that's stanch to State and Church, and will have his child so trained, why didst do it, dame?" asked Humphrey calmly; and Deborah found no reply but tears, and a renewed petition to join the emigrants, to which her husband finally consented; pleasing himself in selecting a site for his new dwelling so far from any gathering place of Friends that it was only on stated occasions, like the quarterly-meetings, that Deborah could find an audience for the grief and shame she never failed to put in evidence before she finished speaking, however she might begin. Wilder invariably attended these occasions, probably because his British pluck suggested that it would be cowardly to shirk any thing so disagreeable; but Molly always remembered how, as she sat one Sunday afternoon on her father's knee, and looked with him at the ghastly prints in "Fox's Book of Martyrs," he muttered over one of them,—

"Maybe that chap didn't witness for his faith any stronger in his half-hour with the lions, than another may do in a dozen years or so of pin-pricks."