‘Why, Vivi, boy,’ she said, drawing him to the light, and pressing her fingers gently over the ugly mark, ‘why did you not tell me of this, and have it seen to, when you came downstairs? However did you manage to do it?’
‘I slipped, and knocked it against the corner of the washstand in our room, Aunt Dora; and I am very sorry, but I broke the glass for drinking water out of. I knocked it on to the floor.’
‘Yes, and you must have upset the ewer too,’ said Ralph, who had been upstairs for a book, ‘for I heard Mary tell Anne that your carpet was soaking, and that you had scrubbed it up with one of mother’s best damask towels.’
Vivian’s face turned scarlet.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he stammered; ‘but the ewer got upset as well, and I did not know what to do. I never thought about the towel. But the ewer isn’t broken, Aunt Dora.’
Mrs Osbourne felt a little troubled. She had always tried to impress upon her own children that the straightforward way, when any mishap occurred, was to come to her at once, and tell her about it; and she could not help wishing that her little nephew had done this instead of saying nothing about the accident until it was found out, and he was compelled to do so, and then try to shrink from inquiries.
But, after all, it was rather an ordeal for a little boy to come down in a strange house and publicly own to having nearly swamped his bedroom, besides having broken a glass; so she contented herself by saying, as she bathed the wounded head, ‘It would have been better if you had told me at once, dear, and then I could have sent Mary to dry up the water; and, perhaps, if your head had been bathed at once there would not have been such a bump.’
She kissed him and sent him away, little dreaming how miserable the poor boy really was, or what a battle was going on in his heart.
In a moment of temptation he had taken a false step, a terribly false one, and that better self which dwells within us all was urging him to retrace it while yet there was time, and it was easy to do so. As he went upstairs to the schoolroom his mother’s words of the Sunday before came into his mind: ‘You have not got the courage to confess when you have done something wrong;’ and, child as he was, he felt the truth of them, and he wished he could make up his mind now to confess everything to Aunt Dora.