"Oh! Mas' Gammon," Mrs. Sumfit burst out; "if I was only certain you said
your prayers faithful every night!" The observation was apparently taken
by Master Gammon to express one of the mere emotions within her bosom,
for he did not reply to it.

She watched him feeding in his steady way, with the patient bent back,
and slowly chopping old grey jaws, and struck by a pathos in the sight,
exclaimed,--

"We've all been searched so, Mas' Gammon! I feel I know everything
that's in me. I'd say, I couldn't ha' given you dumplin's and tears; but
think of our wickedness, when I confess to you I did feel spiteful at you
to think that you were wiltin' to eat the dumplin's while all of us
mourned and rocked as in a quake, expecting the worst to befall; and that
made me refuse them to you. It was cruel of me, and well may you shake
your head. If I was only sure you said your prayers!"

The meaning in her aroused heart was, that if she could be sure Master
Gammon said his prayers, so as to be searched all through by them, as she
was herself, and to feel thereby, as she did, that he knew everything
that was within him, she would then, in admiration of his profound
equanimity, acknowledge him to be a superior Christian.

Naturally enough, Master Gammon allowed the interjection to pass,
regarding it as simply a vagrant action of the engine of speech; while
Mrs. Sumfit, with an interjector's consciousness of prodigious things
implied which were not in any degree comprehended, left his presence in
kindness, and with a shade less of the sense that he was a superior
Christian.