“Well?” said Charles Osmond, seeing her bewildered look.
“I was wondering if people kneel down when they come to confession,” said Swanhild, with a simple directness which charmed him.
“Kneel down to talk to me!” he said, with a smile in his eyes. “Why, no, my child; why should you do that? Sit there by the fire and get warm, and try to make me understand clearly what is your difficulty.”
“It is just this,” said Swanhild, now entirely at her ease. “I want to know if it is ever right to break a promise.”
“Certainly it is sometimes right,” said Charles Osmond. “For instance, if you were to promise me faithfully to pick some one’s pocket on your way home, you would be quite right to break a promise which you never had any right to make. Or if I were to say to you, ‘On no account tell any one at your home that you have been here talking to me,’ and you agreed, yet such a promise would rightly be broken, because no outsider has any right to come between you and your parents.”
“My father and mother are dead,” said Swanhild. “I live with my brother and sister, who are much older than I am—I mean really very old, you know—twenty-three. They are my guardians; and what troubles me is that last summer I did something and promised some one that I would never tell them, and now I am afraid I ought not to have done it.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, ever since then there has seemed to be a difference at home, and, though I thought what I did would help Frithiof and Sigrid, and make every one happier, yet it seems to have somehow brought a cloud over the house. They have not spoken to me about it, but ever since then Frithiof has had such a sad look in his eyes.”
“Was it anything wrong that you promised to do—anything that in itself was wrong, I mean?”
“Oh, no,” said Swanhild; “the only thing that could have made it wrong was my doing it for this particular person.”