Nine years had made but little change in Miss Betsey McPherson, either mentally or physically. As she had been at the Thanksgiving dinner where we first met her, so she was now, with possibly a little sharper tone in her voice and a shade more of eccentricity in her nature. As she lived alone then with her two servants, so she lived alone now, with the same cook in the kitchen, but not the same housemaid to attend her. Flora had been married for five or six years to a respectable mechanic, and lived in a small white house across the common, with three children to care for--two boys and a girl. This last she had thought to call for her former mistress to whom she had timidly expressed her intention, asking if she would be godmother.
"Flo is a fool to saddle her child with a name she hates," Miss McPherson thought, but she consented to act as sponsor, and wore her best black silk in honor of the occasion, when Sunday came and she took her accustomed seat in church.
But her thoughts were evidently not upon the service, for she knelt in the wrong place, and once said aloud in her abstraction, "Let us pray," and there was a twinkle in her round bright eyes, and a grim smile on her face when she at last arose, and straight and stiff as a darning-needle walked up the aisle, and took in her arms the little pink and white baby who was to bear her name. It was a pretty child, and as she held it for a moment and looked into its clear blue eyes fixed so questioningly upon her face, there came to her the thought of another little blue-eyed girl who had come to her on the sands of Aberystwyth, and the touch of whose hands as they rubbed and patted the folds of her dress she could feel even now after the lapse of many years. That child had said to her that Betsey was a horrid name; this child in her arms would think so, too, and hate it all her life, and when the clergyman, said, "Name this child," she answered, in a loud, clear voice, which rang distinctly through the church: "Bessie McPherson!"
"No, no; oh, no!" Flora gasped in a whisper, "it is Betsey, ma'am; it is for you."
"Hush! I know what I am about," was whispered back, and so Bessie McPherson, and not Betsey, was received into Christ's flock and signed with the sign of the cross, and given to the happy mother happier than she dared to own because of the change of name.