"Papa, you know, don't you?" she said, hiding her blushing face on his breast.
"I choose to have you tell me; I want a full confession of all the wrong-doing you have been guilty of since I left you the other day."
"I disobeyed you last night, papa, about taking a long walk by myself; but it was because I forgot to notice how far I was going; at least, I didn't notice," she stammered, remembering that she had wilfully refrained from so doing.
"You forgot? forgot to pay attention to your father's commands? did not think them of sufficient importance for you to take the trouble to impress them upon your mind. I cannot accept that excuse as a good and sufficient one.
"And, tell me honestly, are you not, as I strongly suspect, less careful to obey your father's orders when he is away, so that you feel yourself in a measure out of his reach, than when he is close at hand?"
"Papa, you ask such hard questions," she said.
"Hard to my little daughter only because of her own wrong-doing. But hard or easy, they must be answered. Tell me the truth, would you not have been more careful to keep within prescribed bounds last night if I had been at home, or you had known that you would see me here to-day?"
"Yes, papa," she answered, in a low, unwilling tone. "I don't think anybody else can have quite so much authority over me as you, and—and so I do, I suppose, act a little more as if I could do as I please when you are away."
"And that after I have explained to you again and again that in my absence you are quite as much under the authority of the kind friends with whom I have placed you as under mine when I am with you. I see there is no effectual way to teach you the lesson but by punishing you for disregarding it."
Then he made her give him a detailed account of her ramble of the night before and its consequences.