She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction—
"You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a child then, and could not have done it."
And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago.
Mark Twain.
(To be Continued.)