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The father was quite pleased with his Petrea, who, quite electrified, sang too with all her might, although not with a most harmonious voice, which, however, did not annoy her father's somewhat unmusical ear. "She sings louder than they all," said he to his wife, who was considerably less charmed than he with Petrea's musical accompaniment.
With this feeling, and convinced by it that her present undertaking was good and necessary, whatever its consequences might be, Petrea's heart became light and free.
She would go, but only on Petrea's account; she had no intention of buying anything; she had not money enough wherewith to make purchases; she would not go to the festival; she could not have any pleasure if she did; nothing in the world gave one any pleasure when one had not things exactly to one's own wishes.
Petrea's curiosity was terribly excited, but she could not come at any clue by which to satisfy it. Some kind of plot which concerned the family, seemed to be in agitation.
She delighted herself, moreover, so heartily in all that her sister began, that Petrea sacrificed to her her most beautiful gold-paper temple; her original picture of shepherdesses and altars; and her island of bliss in the middle of peaceful waters, and in the bay of which lay a little fleet of nut-shells, with rigging of silk, and laden with sugar-work, and from the motion of which, and the planting of its wonderful flowers, and glorious fruit-bearing trees, Petrea's heart had first had a foretaste of bliss.
"I was this day in your room; you had left the book lying on the table, and I took it, in order that I might speak with you about it, and prevent Petrea's young steps from treading this path of error without a guide." "People may think what they please," said Sara, "of the influence of the book, but I conceive that author deserves least of all the epithet weak."
And she did read it, feeling intuitively as if her father from the grave were speaking to her, the injured Petrea's child, and virtually casting her aside. The tears gathered slowly in her eyes, dropping one by one upon the paper, which without a word she handed back to Arthur. "What is it, Arthur boy?" Nina asked. "What is it that makes Miggie cry?"
Petrea, with an irresistible desire to make her acquaintance, rushed across the street and offered her the piece of cake which she had in her basket. The little wild creature snatched the piece of cake with violence, showed her row of white teeth, and vanished in the doorway, whilst Elise seized Petrea's hand, in order to keep her restless spirit in check.
To be the first who should carry to the father the important tidings, "Father, I have seen the Wood-god!" was a temptation too strong for Petrea's ambition and craving for sympathy.
What matter if the eye-water burn, so that the eye only become clear; if heaven humiliate, so that it only draw us upwards? "One of Petrea's means of happiness is, to require very few of the temporal things of earth. She regards such things as nearly related to the family of illusions, and will, on that account, have as little as possible to do with them.
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