ver
three years old; but this slowness of development was only in keeping
with his mother's physical type, and his early childhood was a period
of sheer delight to her in which no shadow of the imminent trouble
appeared.

By the time that he had reached his seventh year, Mrs. Payne was
beginning to be worried about him. His bodily health was still
magnificent, but there was a strain in his character that worried her.
It appeared that it was impossible for him to tell the truth.
Haphazard lying is no uncommon thing in children, proceeding, as it
sometimes does, from an excess of imagination and an anxiety to appear
startling; but imagination was scarcely Arthur's strong point, and his
lies were not haphazard, but deliberately planned.

To a woman of Mrs. Payne's uncompromising truthfulness this habit
appeared as a most serious failing. She could not leave it to chance,
in a vague hope that Arthur would "grow out of it." She tackled it,
heroically and directly, by earnest persuasion, and later, by
punishments. By one method and another she determined to appeal to his
moral sense, but after a couple of years of hopeless struggling she was
driven to the conclusion that this, exactly, was what he lacked. It
seemed that he had been born without one.

The thing was impossible to her, for his father had been a man of
exceptional probity and, without self-flattery, she knew that she
herself was the most transparently honest person on earth. As the boy
grew older his opportunities for showing this fatal deficiency
increased. Whatever she said or did, and however sweetly he accepted
her persuasions and punishments, it became evident that she, at any
rate, was incapable of keeping his hands from picking and stealing and
his tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering. The condition
was the more amazing in the face of his great natural charms. All her
friends and visitors at Overton found the boy delightful; his physical
beauty remained as wonderful as ever; on the surface he was a normal
and exceptionally attractive child; but in her heart she realised
bitterly that he was a completely a-moral being.

In nothing was this more apparent than in his behaviour towards
animals. Overton, lying as it did in the midst of a green countryside,
was a natural sanctuary for all wild creatures, in which Arthur, from
his earliest years, had always shown a peculiar interest. As a child,
he would spend many hours with the keep