“I took your pocketbook, Tante.”
He spoke with a little embarrassment—not a great deal. “I needed some money at once and knew you would give it to me later. There was no chance to ask. You were downstairs and when I came up afterwards to tell you mother and Aunt Betty were in here and I did not wish them to know.”
There was a slight exclamation of consternation and shame from Peggy, but Mrs. Burton was speechless.
She was not a moralist—that is, it was difficult for her to know how to preach. But would preaching or anything she could say make Billy understand the wrong he had done? His mother and father were the most punctilious people in the world? What must they not have said to him in times past? He was not a child.
“I am sorry, Billy; it wasn’t square,” Polly said finally, but looking and feeling more ashamed than the boy himself apparently did.
Billy’s blue eyes were puzzled and regretful, but not conscience-smitten.
“You intended to persuade father to take me west with you and I would rather have gone than anything in the world,” he remarked slowly in reply. “Now you don’t want me to go because you are afraid of the responsibility I would be, and you don’t trust me.”
He did not put this as a question. He was making a statement. Nevertheless his aunt answered, “Yes.”
Then, without any further explanation and without even asking to be forgiven, Billy walked out of the room.
“He is the queerest boy in the world,” Peggy said in distressed tones when the door closed; “and worries mother and father nearly to death. No one of us understands him. He does whatever he likes and then accepts his punishment without a word. He does not like the farm as Dan and I do, and has never been a hundred miles away. Yet he would rather do a horrid thing like this and so spoil his chance for going west with you. Father might have given in.”