“I wish you to get your hand-bag and ride in here with me,” she said, with the air of one whose wish was law.  But when he was sitting opposite and the carriage door was shut, she smiled companionably across at him and added:  “You foolish boy!”

“It wasn’t foolish,” he maintained doggedly.  “I know what I ought to do—­and I’m not doing it.  Everybody around here knows both of us, and—­”

“Hush!” she commanded.  “I refuse to hear another word.  I said you were a foolish boy, and it will be inexcusably impolite in you to prove that you are not.”

Tom was glad enough to be silent; and it came to him, after a little, that she was giving him a chance to pull himself together to meet the ordeal that was before him.  In all the misery of the moment—­the misery which belongs to those who ride to the block, the gallows or other mortal finalities—­he marveled that she could be a girl and still be so thoughtful and far-seeing; and once again it made him feel young and inadequate and awkwardly her inferior.

At the Woodlawn gates she pulled the old-fashioned, check-strap signal, and Scipio reined in his horses.

“Are you quite sure you don’t want me to go in with you?” she asked, while Tom was fumbling the door-latch.

He nodded and said:  “There’ll be trouble enough to go around among as many as can crowd in, all right.  But I can’t let you.”

“Still, you won’t say you don’t want me?”

“No; lying isn’t one of the things I was expelled for.  When I stand up to my mother to tell her what I’ve got to tell her, I’d be glad if there was a little fise-dog sniffling around to back me up.  But I’m not going to call in the neighbors—­you, least of all.”

“You are disappointing me right along—­and I’m rather glad,” she said.  And then, almost wistfully:  “You are going to be good, aren’t you, Tom?”

His look was so sober that it was well-nigh sullen.  “I’m going to say what I’ve got to say, and then hold my tongue if I have to bite it,” he answered.  “Good-by; and—­and a Merry Christmas, and—­thank you.”

He shut the carriage door and gave Scipio the word to go on; and afterward stood at the gate looking after the great lumbering ark on wheels until it turned in at the Deer Trace driveway and was lost in the winding avenue of thick-set evergreens.  Then he let himself in at the home gate, walking leaden-footed toward the ornate house at the top of the knoll and wishing the distance were ten times as great.

When he reached the house there was an ominous air of quiet about it, and a horse and buggy, with a black boy holding the reins, stood before the door.  Tom’s heart came into his mouth.  The turnout was Doctor Williams’s.

“Who’s sick?” he asked of the boy who was holding the doctor’s horse, and his tongue was thick with a nameless fear.

The black boy did not know; and Tom crept up the steps and let himself in as one enters a house of mourning, breaking down completely when he saw his father sitting bowed on the hall seat.