“Then, Walter, is the burden still to rest on the wrong shoulders? and is Dick to be punished for your fault?”
“Oh, as to that, auntie, Dick shan’t be the worse for it in the end: he has had a sovereign remedy already; and I’ll beg him off from being turned away when I see my father has quite cooled down.”
Miss Huntingdon said nothing in reply, but laid one of her hands across the other on her little work-table. Walter saw the action, but turned his head away and fidgeted in his chair. At last he said, “That’s rather hard, auntie, to make me a moral coward again so soon.”
“Is it hard, Walter?” she replied gently. “The next best thing to not doing wrong is to be sorry for it when you have done it.”
“Well, Aunt Kate, I am sorry—terribly sorry. I wish I’d never touched the horses. I wish that fellow Bob had been a hundred miles off yesterday afternoon.”
“I daresay, Walter; but is that all? Are you not going to show that you are sorry? Won’t you imitate, as far as it is now possible, little George Washington’s moral courage?”
“What! go and tell my father the whole truth? Do you think I ought?”
“I am sure you ought, dear boy.”
Walter reflected for a while, then he said, in a sorrowful tone, “Ah, but there’s a difference. George Washington didn’t and wouldn’t tell a lie, but I would, and did; so it’s too late now for me to show moral courage.”
“Not at all, Walter; on the contrary, it will take a good deal of moral courage to confess your fault now. Of course it would have been far nobler had you gone straight to your father and told him just how things were; and then, too, you would not have been Dick’s tempter, leading him to sin. Still, there is a right and noble course open to you now, dear boy, which is to go and undo the mischief and the wrong as far as you can.”