It was a very unpleasant awakening for him. Of all things, this is what he had wanted to keep from her. His ingenuous face—and it was an ingenuous face in spite of the wine bills—flushed deeply with annoyance.
"It's what you need not have heard about, mother. I came away from Oxford without paying a few pounds I owe there; that's all. There need be no fuss about it."
"I hear of wine bills, and horses, and things of that kind. Oh, my dear, need you have entered into that fast sort of life?"
"Others enter into it," said Charley.
"It is not so much the cost that troubles me," added Mrs. Raynor, in loving tones; "that can be met somehow. It is——" She stopped as if wanting words.
"It is what, mother?"
"Charley, my dear, what I think of is this—that you may be falling into the world's evil ways. It is so easy to do it; you young lads are so inexperienced and confiding; you think all is fair that looks fair; that no poison lurks in what has a specious surface. And oh, my boy, you know that there is a world after this world; and if you were to fall too deeply into the ways of this, to get to love it, to be unable to do without it, you might never gain the other. Some young lads that have fallen away from God have not cared to find Him again; never have found Him.
"There has been no harm," said Charley. "And I assure you I don't often miss chapel."
"Charley, dear, there's a verse in Ecclesiastes that I often think of," she resumed in low sweet tones. "All mothers think of it, I fancy, when their sons begin to go out in the world."
"In Ecclesiastes?" repeated Charley.