Priscilla turned without another word, but there was an ugly line between
her eyes.

That night and the next she took the matter before a higher judge,
and fervently, rigidly prayed. On the third night she pronounced
her ultimatum. Kneeling by the tiny gable window of her grim little
bedchamber, her face strained and intense, her big eyes fixed on a red,
pulsing planet above the hemlocks outside, she said:

"Dear God, I'll give you three days to move his stony heart to let me
go to school; if you don't do it by then, I'm going to worship graven
images!"

Priscilla at that time was eight, and three days seemed to her a generous
time limit. But Nathaniel's stony heart did not melt, and at the end of
the three days Priscilla ceased to pray for many and many a year, and
forthwith she proceeded to worship a graven image of her own creation.

A mile up the grassy road, beyond Lonely Farm and on the way toward the
deep woods, was an open space of rich, red rock surrounded by a soft,
feathery fringe of undergrowth and a few well-grown trees. From this spot
one could see the Channel widened out into the Little Bay: the myriad
islands, and, off to the west, the Secret and Fox Portages, beyond which
lay the Great Bay, where the storms raged and the wind--such wind as
Kenmore never knew--howled and tore like a raging fiend!

In this open stretch of trees and rock Priscilla set up her own god. She
had found the bleached skull of a cow in one of her father's pastures;
this gruesome thing mounted upon a forked stick, its empty eye-sockets