"LITTLE FAULTS"
Jamie and his mother were talking together very earnestly. The boy's face looked cross and impatient, while his mother's was sad and serious.
Mrs. Burnham had sent Jamie to the store to buy a yard of muslin and a spool of thread. When he gave her back the change, she counted it, and saw at once that there were three pennies missing.
If this had been the first time that Jamie had brought his mother too little change, she would have thought a mistake had been made at the store, or that he had lost the money.
She would have been glad to believe it now. But after she had questioned him, she felt sure, by looking into his eyes—eyes that did not look back into hers— that the boy whom she loved, and wished to trust, had used the pennies to buy something for himself, and was trying to deceive her.
"Oh, Jamie!" she said, "you don't know how it troubles me to think you would do such a thing;" and her eyes filled with tears as she looked into her son's face.
Jamie really was a little ashamed, but he didn't like to say so. "Oh, Mother, you make such a fuss over nothing!" he answered, turning to look out of the window. "It was only two or three pennies! I don't see why you should feel so badly over such a little thing. What if I did spend them for something else?"
"I know it is a little thing," his mother told him. "It isn't the pennies I care about. I would have given them to you gladly if you had asked for them; but I cannot bear to have you take them and not tell the truth about it.
"It is only a little fault, I know; but little faults grow into big ones, just as little boys grow into big men. You must look out for your little faults now, Jamie, or you will have big ones when you are a man. A boy ten years old should know the difference between right and wrong."