'Are you going to increase your disobedience by dishonesty? Have you been at my trunk? Have you unlocked that, and got it?'
'Pooh! no. I remembered that.'
'I wish you would learn your multiplication-table as easily.'
'Sixteen times sixteen are two hundred and fifty-six, and that's as far as the table goes!'
'You are in high glee to-night. Does it make you happy to be wicked?'
'O mother! not to be wicked! but to be up, to have been out, to have seen my beauty, and oh! I never shall see her any more, I never can go there again!' and bursting into tears, he went crying to bed and sobbing to sleep.
The next day, when the mournful Fauntleroy returned at night from school, there stood in his mother's small sitting-room the beloved piano, a roll of old and invaluable musical MSS. upon it, and an envelope containing a sum of money, with directions that it should be employed in paying a teacher for Master Fauntleroy Verrian.
The mother entering soon from an unusual day's work abroad—for she was assisting at a trousseau—first looked about her in amaze, and then hung long above the writing on the envelope, holding it to the light, and trying it by a thousand whims.
'Yes,' she murmured at length, 'with all the false color of hair and beard, with all the disguised tones and hidden pen-strokes, he is unchanged. This is he, and strange it is that my heart does not break. Of what, of what can I be made? How hard that heart must be; for my love is as utterly extinct as his.'
Nevertheless, she hurried on shawl and hood again, and returned to the house from which she had lately issued. She never had occasion to seek it again, for the trousseau upon which she had worked, was from that evening abandoned.