"She made us promise—your father and me.... God knows it did no more than repay what your father had suffered.... Your future was everything to us...."
"And I have been maintained at Oxford by her money," he said, pausing in his bitterness on every word.
"Not by that only, Taffy! There was your scholarship ... and it was true about my savings on the lace-work...."
But he brushed her feeble explanations away with a little gesture of impatience. "Oh, why, mother? Oh, why?"
She heard him groan and stretched out her arms.
"Taffy, forgive me—forgive us! We did wrongly, I see—I see it as plain now as you. But we did it for your sake."
"You should have told me. I was not a child. Yes, yes, you should have told me."
Yes; there lay the truth. They had treated him as a child when he was no longer a child. They had swathed him round with love, forgetting that boys grow and demand to see with their own eyes and walk on their own feet. To every mother of sons there comes sooner or later the sharp lesson which came to Humility that morning; and few can find any defence but that which Humility stammered, sitting in her chair and gazing piteously up at the tall youth confronting her: "I did it for your sake." Be pitiful, O accusing sons, in that hour! For, terrible as your case may be against them, your mothers are speaking the simple truth.
Taffy took her hand "The money must be paid back, every penny of it."
"Yes, dear."