"Oh, if you were determined—" returns she, with a shrug.
"I was not determined: you mistake me," exclaims Mona, miserably. "I simply hadn't a headache: I never had one in my life,—and I shouldn't know how to get one!"
At this point, Geoffrey—who has been hunting all the morning—enters the room with Captain Rodney.
"Why, what is the matter?" he says, seeing signs of the lively storm on all their faces. Doatie explains hurriedly.
"Look here," says Geoffrey. "I won't have Mona spoiled. If she hadn't a headache, she hadn't, you know, and if you were at home, why, you were, and that's all about it. Why should she tell a lie about it?"
"What do you mean, Geoffrey?" demands his mother, with suppressed indignation.
"I mean that she shall remain just as she is. The world may be 'given to lying,' as Shakspeare tells us, but I will not have Mona tutored into telling fashionable falsehoods," says this intrepid young man facing his mother without a qualm of a passing dread. "A lie of any sort is base, and a prevarication is only a mean lie. She is truthful, let her stay so. Why should she learn it is the correct thing to say she is not at home when she is, or that she is suffering from a foolish megrim when she isn't? I don't suppose there is much harm in saying either of these things, as nobody ever believes them; but—let her remain as she is."
"Is she also to learn that you are at liberty to lecture your own mother?" asks Lady Rodney, pale with anger.
"I am not lecturing anyone," replies he, looking very like her, now that his face has whitened a little and a quick fire has lit itself within his eyes. "I am merely speaking against a general practice. 'Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie,' is a line that always returns to me. And, as I love Mona better than anything on earth, I shall make it the business of my life to see she is not made unhappy by any one."
At this Mona lifts her head, and turns upon him eyes full of the tenderest love and trust. She would have dearly liked to go to him, and place her arms round his neck, and thank him with a fond caress for this dear speech, but some innate sense of breeding restrains her.