"What?" he asked with curiosity. "What do you mean? I don't understand."
Helen's voice sank low, and she hardly seemed to be speaking to her son.
"Your father made you what you are," she said, and her face grew cold and hard.
"What? Stupid?" asked Archie, cheerfully. Then his face changed, too. "I say, mother," he went on, in another voice, "do you think I'm so dull because he hit me on the head?"
Helen repented her words, scarcely knowing why, but sure that it would have been better not to speak them. She did not answer the question.
"That's what you think," said Archie. "And it's because I'm not like other people that you say it's absurd of me to want to marry Sylvia Strahan, isn't it? And that's my father's doing? Is that what you think?"
He waited for an answer, but none came at once. Helen was startled by the clear sequence of ideas, far more logical than most of his reasonings. It seemed as if his sudden passion for Sylvia had roused his sluggish intelligence from its long torpor. She could not deny the truth of what he said, and he saw that she could not.
"That's it," he continued. "That's what you think. I knew it."
His brows knitted themselves straight across his forehead, and his eyes were fixed upon his mother's face, as he knelt beside her. She had not been looking at him, but she turned to him slowly now.
"And that's why you ask whether I can forgive him," he concluded.