This girl was a little older than Elizabeth Parris, and had shared the same love, the same bed, and the same table with her from childhood up. She was an orphan and the child of an orphan. It was said in whispers, by the old gossips of the place, that her mother came from some remote Indian settlement, where she and her little sister--afterwards the wife of Samuel Parris--had been left like wild animals, to live or die, probably by some unfortunate or unnatural parent. But these two helpless creatures had escaped the wilderness and sought shelter among the inhabitants of Salem. The elder girl gave no account of herself save that she had escaped great danger, and fled from the woods where her mother had perished. The little one only clung to her sister with fond love in her deep blue eyes, and a timid struggle if any one attempted to draw her from that singular protection. She was quite too young for any knowledge of her own history. For a time this brave girl and her sister were received and kindly treated by the inhabitants, but after a year or two it came out that, even in the wilderness, she had imbibed, no one could tell how, those Quaker heresies so obnoxious to the prevailing religionists. Becoming more and more bold in declaring them, she had been driven forth into the wilderness again, cruelly scourged by the law, and hunted down by her fellow-men like a she-wolf caught at her prey. The younger child, to whom all religious creeds remained a blessed mystery, was forcibly torn from the arms of her sister, whose very touch was considered contagious by the regenerated, and adopted into the church. She was too young at the time of her sister's martyrdom, for such in spirit it was, to resist either this cruelty or kindness, and the very people who had hunted her sister out of civilized life were the most eager for her welfare, and strove most diligently to render her happy and comfortable. Indeed, she was in reality the ewe lamb of the church, and, being of a peaceful, gentle nature, soon learned to look upon the troubles of her first childhood as a dream, and think of the brave sister, who had been ready to perish for her, as one of the characters that she loved to read about in the Bible. Thus she surrounded the past with a sort of religious mystery, which threw a shade of sadness over her whole life, but never, till the very last, embittered it as a knowledge of the whole truth would have done. This young girl became to the church a lamb of atonement for her sister's heresy. She grew up beautiful as an angel, both in soul and body; became the wife of Samuel Parris, the mother of his child, and then, in truth, an angel. But a thing happened on the very day before her death, which no human being ever understood save the young wife, whose death-blow came with the knowledge it brought.