the sweetness
of this little girl.

She put her arms up around his neck and her soft, caressing fingers
seemed to play with his very heart strings. Oh, how dear she was! And
her new life would be so different. Madam Wetherill rather flouted the
Friends with what she called their drab religion.

"Primrose! Primrose!" called the curiously soft voice of Chloe, that had
a different accent from the habitual evenness of the real Quaker tone.
"Where is the child!"

"Here! here! I am coming." She gave Andrew one long, tender kiss and
then walked rapidly to the kitchen porch.

"Thee should have been in bed with the chickens. Go at once. The moon is
coming up and thou wilt need no light. Forget not thy prayers. Mistress
Janice is an emissary of the evil one that thou must resist."

Primrose went up to her chamber under the eaves in a state of half
terror and restrained rebellion.

CHAPTER II.

BESSY WARDOUR.

It was a rather curious tangle, as Primrose Henry was to learn
afterward. Philemon Henry was older than his brother James, and in trade
in the city that William Penn had planned and founded in an orderly
manner. And though it is the common belief that Philadelphia was born at
right angles and on a level, at its early inception there was much
diversity to it. Creeks swept it in many directions, and there were
hills and submerged lands waiting for the common sense of man to fill up
and hew down the romance. Even before Revolutionary times there was much
business on the wharves of the Delaware, and many men owned trading
ships and warehouses. And though England had made no end of bothersome
and selfish restrictions as to trade, men had found ways to evade them;
at some peril, it is true, but that added zest.

Philemon Henry was tolerably successful in his undertakings and adhered
to the faith of William Penn, even if his own son afterward went astray.
He married an Englishwoman of good descent, who had left her native land
with a company of Friends for the sake of the larger liberty. The fine,
stalwart Quaker had soon attracted her, and with him she spent three
years of happy married life, when she died, leaving a baby boy of little
more than a year old. A goodly housekeeper came to care for them, and
the boy throve finely. She would willingly have married Philemon, but
as he evinced no inclination, she provided for her old age by marrying
another well-to-do Friend. And then, as sometimes happens in a widowe