lie! It was a very small lie, such as dozens of
children tell--are punished and pardoned--but a lie it was. It
happened on August morning, when the raspberries for which the Manse was
famous. He was desired not to touch them--"not to lay a finger on
them," insisted the mother. And he promised. But, alas! The promises
of four years old are not absolutely reliable; and so that which
happened once in a more ancient garden happened in the garden of the
Manse. Boy plucked and ate. He came back to his mother with his white
pinafore all marked and his red mouth redder still with condemnatory
stains. Yet, when asked "if he had touched the raspberries," he opened
that wicked mouth and said, unblushingly, "No!"

Of course it was an untruth--self-evident; in its very simplicity
almost amusing; but the earl was not prepared for the effect it seemed
to have upon Helen. She started back, her lips actually blanched and
her eyes glowing.

"My son has told a lie!" she cried, and kept repeating it over and over
again. "My son has looked me in the face and told me a lie--his
first lie!"

"Hush, Helen!" for her manner seemed actually to frighten the child.

"No, I can not pass it over! I dare not! He must be punished. Come!"

She seized Boy by the hand, looking another way, and was moving off with
him, as if she hardly knew what she was doing.

"Helen!" called the earl, almost reproachfully; for, in his opinion, out
of all comparison with the offense seemed the bitterness with which the
mother felt it, and was about to punish it. "Tell me, first, what are
you going to do with the child?"

"I hardly know--I must think--must pray. What if my son, my only
son, should inherit--I mean, if he should grow up a liar?"

That word "inherit" betrayed her. No wonder now at the mother's agony
of fear--she who was mother to Captain Bruce's son. Lord Cairnforth
guessed it all.

"I understand," said he. "But--"

"No," Helen interrupted, "you need understand nothing, for I have told
you nothing. Only I must kill the sin--the fatal sin--at the very
root. I must punish him. Come, child!"

"Come back, Helen," said the earl; and something in the tone made her
obey at once, as occasionally during her life Helen had been glad to
obey him, and creep under the shelter of a stronger will and clearer
judgment than her own. "You are altogether mistaken, my dear friend.
Your boy is only a child, and errs as such, and you treat him as