But he brushed her feeble explanations away with a little gesture of impatience. “Oh why, mother?—Oh why?”
She heard him groan and stretched out her arms.
“Taffy, forgive me—forgive us! We did wrongly, I see—I see it as plain now as you. But we did it for your sake.”
“You should have told me. I was not a child. Yes, yes, you should have told me.”
Yes; there lay the truth. They had treated him as a child when he was no longer a child. They had swathed him round with love, forgetting that boys grow and demand to see with their own eyes and walk on their own feet. To every mother of sons there comes sooner or later the sharp lesson which came to Humility that morning; and few can find any defence but that which Humility stammered, sitting in her chair and gazing piteously up at the tall youth confronting her: “I did it for your sake.” Be pitiful, oh accusing sons, in that hour! For, terrible as your case may be against them, your mothers are speaking the simple truth.
Taffy took her hand. “The money must be paid back, every penny of it.”
“Yes, dear.”
“How much?”
Humility kept a small account-book in the work-box beside her. She opened the pages, but, seeing his outstretched hand, gave it obediently to Taffy, who took it to the window.
“Almost two hundred pounds.” He knit his brows and began to drum with his fingers on the window-pane. “And we must put the interest at five per cent.... With my first in Moderations I might find some post as an usher in a small school.... There’s an agency which puts you in the way of such things: I must look up the address.... We will leave this house, of course.”