Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: "Tata, dear, why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn't you give him something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act so oddly?"
Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make it out.
"What did you say?"
"I couldn't tell which," the child still whispered; but now her mother's ear was at her lips.
"How, which?"
"To give him. The more I looked," and the whisper became a quivering breath, "the more I couldn't tell which. And I wanted to give them all to him, but I couldn't tell whether it would be right, because you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas," and the quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to catch the child up to her heart.
"Dear little tender conscience!" she said, still wiping her eyes when she told the child's father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk about her before they slept. "And I was ashamed of her before that woman! I know she misjudged her; but we ought to have remembered how fine and precious she is, and known how she must have suffered, trying to decide."
"Yes, conscience," the father said. "And temperament, the temperament to which decision is martyrdom."
"And she will always have to be deciding! She'll have to decide for you, some day, as I do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose—she gets it from you."