At breakfast Taffy found a letter on his table, addressed in his mother’s hand.  As a rule she wrote twice a week, and this was not one of the usual days for hearing from her.  But nothing was too good to happen that morning.  He snatched up the letter and broke the seal.

“My dearest boy,” it ran, “I want you home at once to consult with me.  Something has happened (forgive me, dear, for not preparing you; but the blow fell on me yesterday so suddenly)—­something which makes it doubtful, and more than doubtful, that you can continue at Oxford.  And something else they say has happened which I will never believe in unless I hear it from my boy’s lips.  I have this comfort, at any rate, that he will never tell me a falsehood.  This is a matter which cannot be explained by letter, and cannot wait until the end of term.  Come home quickly, dear; for until you are here I can have no peace of mind.”

So once again Taffy travelled homewards by the night mail.

“Mother, it’s a lie!”

Taffy’s face was hot, but he looked straight into his mother’s eyes.  She too was rosy-red:  being ever a shamefast woman.  And to speak of these things to her own boy—­

“Thank God!” she murmured, and her fingers gripped the arms of her chair.

“It’s a lie!  Where is the girl?”

“She is in the workhouse, I believe.  I don’t know who spread it, or how many have heard.  But Honoria believes it.”

“Honoria!  She cannot—­” He came to a sudden halt.  “But, mother, even supposing Honoria believes it, I don’t see—­”

He was looking straight at her.  Her eyes sank.  Light began to break in on him.

“Mother!”

Humility did not look up.

“Mother!  Don’t tell me that she—­that Honoria—­”

“She made us promise—­your father and me. . . .  God knows it did no more than repay what your father had suffered. . . .  Your future was everything to us. . . .”

“And I have been maintained at Oxford by her money,” he said, pausing in his bitterness on every word.

“Not by that only, Taffy!  There was your scholarship . . . and it was true about my savings on the lace-work. . . .”

But he brushed her feeble explanations away with a little gesture of impatience.  “Oh why, mother?—­Oh why?”

She heard him groan and stretched out her arms.

“Taffy, forgive me—­forgive us!  We did wrongly, I see—­I see it as plain now as you.  But we did it for your sake.”

“You should have told me.  I was not a child.  Yes, yes, you should have told me.”

Yes; there lay the truth.  They had treated him as a child when he was no longer a child.  They had swathed him round with love, forgetting that boys grow and demand to see with their own eyes and walk on their own feet.  To every mother of sons there comes sooner or later the sharp lesson which came to Humility that morning; and few can find any defence but that which Humility stammered, sitting in her chair and gazing piteously up at the tall youth confronting her:  “I did it for your sake.”  Be pitiful, oh accusing sons, in that hour!  For, terrible as your case may be against them, your mothers are speaking the simple truth.