It can readily be conceived that Priscilla could not soon forget the incidents of that day's drive, the last she ever took with Inez Dwight. What with the apparition of Blenke and the blanketed Indians at the ravine, the runaway of the ponies on the prairie, and the astounding revelation that followed, the honest-hearted girl was utterly at a loss as to her duty in the premises. Six weeks back she would not have hesitated. She would have known infallibly just what to say and do, and unflinchingly would she have said and done it. But, all was different now. Her faith was strong as ever, firm and unshaken, but her self-confidence was gone. She had made some of the worst mistakes of her thirty years within the last three months. She had justly offended her fondest, truest friends; had brought dire distress, untold suffering, on a most loving and devoted father, and cruel punishment to an innocent and trusting child. Her head had been bowed to the dust in self-condemnation, in humility unspeakable. She could have dragged herself upon her knees every inch of the road from their door to Dwight's, and with streaming eyes and clasping hands, a well-nigh broken and all contrite heart, could have bathed his feet with her tears and implored his forgiveness. It was characteristic of Oswald Dwight,--the old Oswald Dwight coming once again through this hell of suffering and from the very threshold of the other world into the kingdom of self-search and self-dominion,--that he should send for her,--beg that she should be brought to him,--that he might lift from her mind a moiety at least of its weight of self-accusation. It was characteristic of him thereafter that, after the first few hours with his blessed boy--and God alone knows what intensity of prayer, petition, love, and resolve surged through the heart and soul of the almost re-created man--he should try to show Priscilla Sanford that he blamed himself alone, not her; that he honored her, respected her, believed in her, and that he rejoiced to see the friendship that was daily growing between her and his beloved little son. The readings that seemed so long to the censorious were not all reading, after all, for presently and little by little the book would be dropped, the page would be discussed, and, once away from her hobby of original, sin and universal damnation--the Calvinistic creed of that stern, pure-hearted if Puritanical woman--there was much that appealed to the stern, true-hearted soldier nature of the even maturer man. A famous Covenanter--a Roundhead after Cromwell's own heart--might Oswald Dwight have been had he dwelt in Merry England, where sunstrokes were unknown and dark-eyed sirens seldom heard of. As for Priscilla, she needed but the garb to fit her for the austere duties of the sect whence sprung her mother and her name. But it was a chastened, softened, subdued Priscilla that now wrestled in spirit with the problem set before her.