“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 if he had sinned like a grown-up man.  Be reasonable.  We will both take care of him.  No fear that he will turn out a liar!”

Helen hesitated; but still her looks were so angry and stern, all the mother vanished out of them, that the boy, instead of clinging to her, ran away crying, and hid himself behind Lord Cairnforth’s chair.

“Leave him to me, Helen.  Can not you trust me—­me—­with your son!”

Mrs. Bruce paused.

“Now,” said the earl, wheeling himself round a little, so that he came face to face with the sobbing child, “lift up your head, Boy, and speak the truth like a man to me and to your mother—­see!  She is listening.  Did you touch those raspberries?”

“No!”

“Cardross!” Calling him by his rarely-spoken name, not his pet-name, and fixing upon him eyes, not angry, but clear and searching, that compelled the truth even from a child, “think again.  You must tell us!”

“No, me didn’t touch them,” answered Boy, dropping his head in conscious shame.  “Not with me fingers.  Me just opened me mouth and they popped in.”

Lord Cairnforth could hardly help smiling at the poor little sinner—­ the infant Jesuit attaining his object by such an ingenious device; but the mother didn’t smile, and her look was harder than ever.

“You hear!  If not a lie, it was a prevarication.  He who lies is a scoundrel, but he who prevaricates is a scoundrel and coward too.  Sooner than Boy should grow up like—­like that, I would rather die.  No, I would rather see him die; for I might come in time to hate my own son.”