" Pemberton insisted. "Give me your written
rendering."

Morgan pushed a copybook across the table, and he began to read the page,
but with something running in his head that made it no sense. Looking up
after a minute or two he found the child's eyes fixed on him and felt in
them something strange. Then Morgan said: "I'm not afraid of the stern
reality."

"I haven't yet seen the thing you _are_ afraid of--I'll do you that
justice!"

This came out with a jump--it was perfectly true--and evidently gave
Morgan pleasure. "I've thought of it a long time," he presently resumed.

"Well, don't think of it any more."

The boy appeared to comply, and they had a comfortable and even an
amusing hour. They had a theory that they were very thorough, and yet
they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, the intervals
between the dull dark tunnels, where there were waysides and jolly views.
Yet the morning was brought to a violent as end by Morgan's suddenly
leaning his arms on the table, burying his head in them and bursting into
tears: at which Pemberton was the more startled that, as it then came
over him, it was the first time he had ever seen the boy cry and that the
impression was consequently quite awful.

The next day, after much thought, he took a decision and, believing it to
be just, immediately acted on it. He cornered Mr. and Mrs. Moreen again
and let them know that if on the spot they didn't pay him all they owed
him he wouldn't only leave their house but would tell Morgan exactly what
had brought him to it.

"Oh you _haven't_ told him?" cried Mrs. Moreen with a pacifying hand on
her well-dressed bosom.

"Without warning you? For what do you take me?" the young man returned.

Mr. and Mrs. Moreen looked at each other; he could see that they
appreciated, as tending to their security, his superstition of delicacy,
and yet that there was a certain alarm in their relief. "My dear
fellow," Mr. Moreen demanded, "what use can you have, leading the quiet
life we all do, for such a lot of money?"--a question to which Pemberton
made no answer, occupied as he was in noting that what passed in the mind
of his patrons was something like: "Oh then, if we've felt that the
child, dear little angel, has judged us and how he regards us, and we
haven't been betrayed, he must have guessed--and in short it's
_general_!" an inference that rather stirred up Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, as
Pemberton had desired it should.