"If I have offended," was my answer, delivered with little humility, "I can only plead my ignorance of the customs of the house."
"No man," he returned, with increased severity, "is so ignorant as not to know right from wrong. Had the matter come to my knowledge sooner, I should have said: Depart from us, for your continued presence in the house offends us; but we have made a compact with you, and, until the year expires, we must suffer you. For the space of sixty days you must dwell apart from us, never leaving the room, where each day a task will be assigned to you, and subsisting on bread and water only. Let us hope that in this period of solitude and silence you will sufficiently repent your crime, and rejoin us afterwards with a changed heart; for all offenses may be forgiven a man, but it is impossible to forgive a lie."
"A lie!" I exclaimed in amazement. "I have told no lie!"
"This," said he, with an access of wrath, "is an aggravation of your former offense. It is even a worse offense than the first, and must be dealt with separately—when the sixty days have expired."
"Are you, then, going to condemn me without hearing me speak, or telling me anything about it? What lie have I told?"
After a pause, during which he closely scrutinized my face, he said, pointing to the open page before him: "Yesterday, in answer to my question, you told me that you could read. Last evening you made a contrary statement to Yoletta; and now here is the book, and you confess that you cannot read it."
"But that is easily explained," said I, immensely relieved, for I certainly had felt a little guilty about the hand-squeezing performance, although it was not a very serious matter. "I can read the books of my own country, and naturally concluded that your books were written in the same kind of letters; but last evening I discovered that it was not so. You have already seen the letters of my country on the coins I showed you last evening."
And here I again pulled out my pocket-book, and emptied the contents on the table.
He began to pick up the sovereigns one by one to examine them. Meanwhile, finding my beautiful black and gold stylograph pen inserted in the book, I thought I could not do better than to show him how I wrote. Fortunately, the fluid in it had not become dry. Tearing a blank page from my book I hastily scribbled a few lines, and handed the paper to him, saying: "This is how I write."
He began studying the paper, but his eyes, I perceived, wandered often to the stylograph pen in my hand.