‘He’s a mere child,’ returned my uncle. ‘I’m not forgetting him. But I can’t send him away yet.’
‘You know best,’ returned my aunt.
Send me away! What could it mean? Why should I—where should I go? Was not the old place a part of me, just like my own clothes on my own body? This was the kind of feeling that woke in me at the words. But hearing my aunt push back her chair, evidently with the purpose of finding me, I descended into the room.
‘Come along, Willie,’ said my uncle. ‘Hear the wind how it roars!’
‘Yes, uncle; it does roar,’ I said, feeling a hypocrite for the first time in my life. Knowing far more about the roaring than he did, I yet spoke like an innocent!
‘Do you know who makes the wind, Willie?’
‘Yes. The trees,’ I answered.
My uncle opened his blue eyes very wide, and looked at my aunt. He had had no idea what a little heathen I was. The more a man has wrought out his own mental condition, the readier he is to suppose that children must be able to work out theirs, and to forget that he did not work out his information, but only his conclusions. My uncle began to think it was time to take me in hand.
‘No, Willie,’ he said. ‘I must teach you better than that.’
I expected him to begin by telling me that God made the wind; but, whether it was that what the old book said about the Prince of the Power of the Air returned upon him, or that he thought it an unfitting occasion for such a lesson when the wind was roaring so as might render its divine origin questionable, he said no more. Bewildered, I fancy, with my ignorance, he turned, after a pause, to my aunt.