Alister’s small face became exceedingly serious.
“I say, don’t be hard on him!” he said, expostulatingly. “He’s such a little chap!”
The Major preserved his solemnity.
“He’s only two years younger than you are—quite old enough to know how to tell the truth!”
“Has he got a mother?” asked Alister.
“Yes.”
“Well, you see, she isn’t here, and he can’t go and ask her about it, so perhaps he got a bit muddled like. I hope you will let him down easy!”
The Major bit his lips under his fuzzy white moustache, to hide the smile that threatened to break into a roar of laughter, as the young gentleman, after giving expression to these sentiments, sauntered off somewhat dejectedly; and then, turning into the house, put away the gun that had been the cause of all the mischief, and went round to the stables to devise some means of stuffing up the broken window in the hall for the night. And his thoughts were touched with sorrow as well as pity.
“Unfortunate little chap!” he muttered. “Once let him take to lying, and he is done for. All the Lettys in the world could not save him. I wonder now how the devil he came to begin it? It is not his first lie—he did it too well, and looked too cool for it. I should like to know how he began!”
And this was just what Miss Letty was finding out, bit by bit, as she sat in her own quiet room with Boy on her knee clasped in her arms, and talking to him gently. She heard all about his life on the sea-shore, and the little scavengers he met there who had taught him how clever it was to “do” people, and to cheat, and generally mislead and deceive the simple and unsuspecting,—and as she listened to the strange moral axioms he had picked up, and gradually gathered from him as he talked some idea of the lonely life he led, uncared for and untaught, save in the most superficial and slipshod fashion, her heart warmed to him more and more with an almost painful tenderness, and when with a short sigh he paused in his disjointed narrative, the tears were heavy in her eyes. She set him gently down from her knee and kissed him.