“Angus, you know why I came with you?”
“Yes, I know well enough why you came with me,” said Angus, bitterly. “Just because that stupid old meddler, Helen Raeburn, took it into her wooden head that I could not take care of myself, and talked my father into sending me with you now, instead of letting me go the other way round by myself! Could not take care of myself, forsooth!”
“Have you done it?”
“I hadn’t it to do. Mr Duncan Keith was to take care of me, just as if I had been a baby—stuff! There is no end to the folly of old women!”
“I think young men might sometimes match them. Well, Angus, I have taken as much care as you let me. But you deceived me, boy. I know more about it than you think. It was not one or two transgressions that let you down to this pitch. I know you had a private key from Rob Greensmith, and let yourself in and out when I believed you asleep.”
Angus sputtered out some angry words, which I did not catch.
“No. You are mistaken. Leigh did not tell of you or his brother. Your friend Robert told me himself. He wanted to get out of the scrape, and he did not care about leaving you in it. The friendship of the wicked is not worth much, Angus. But if I had not known it, I should still have felt perfectly sure that there had been more going on than you ever confessed to me. Three months since, Angus, you would not have used words which you have used this day. You would not have spoken so lightly of being ‘let in’—let into what? Just stop and think. And twice to-day—once in Flora’s presence—you have only just stopped your tongue from a worse word than that. Would you have said such a thing to your father before we left Abbotscliff?”
“Uncle Courtenay was as drunk as any of them last night,” Angus blurted out.
I did not like to hear that of Father. Till now I never thought much about such things, except that they were imperfections which men had and women had not, and the women must put up with them. Sins?—well, yes, I suppose getting drunk is a sin, if you come to think about it; but so is getting into a passion, and telling falsehoods, and plenty more things which one thinks little or nothing about, because one sees everybody do them every day. It is only the extra good people, like my Aunt Kezia, and Flora, and Mr Keith, that put on grave faces about things of that kind.
But stay! God must be better than the extra good people. Then will He not think even worse of such things than they do?