“Hedrick, Hedrick, Hedrick!” wailed Mrs. Madison.  “And she told me you drove her from the table last night too, right before Miss Peirce!” Miss Peirce was the nurse, fortunately at this moment in the sick-room.

“I did hear her ask him that,” he insisted, sullenly.  “Don’t you believe it?”

“Certainly not!”

Burning with outrage, he also left his meal unfinished and departed in high dignity.  He passed through the kitchen, however, on his way out of the house; but, finding an unusual politeness to the cook nothing except its own reward, went on his way with a bitter perception of the emptiness of the world and other places.

“Your father managed to talk more last night,” said Mrs. Madison pathetically to Laura.  “He made me understand that he was fretting about how little we’d been able to give our children; so few advantages; it’s always troubled him terribly.  But sometimes I wonder if we’ve done right:  we’ve neither of us ever exercised any discipline.  We just couldn’t bear to.  You see, not having any money, or the things money could buy, to give, I think we’ve instinctively tried to make up for it by indulgence in other ways, and perhaps it’s been a bad thing.  Not,” she added hastily, “not that you aren’t all three the best children any mother and father ever had! He said so.  He said the only trouble was that our children were too good for us.”  She shook her head remorsefully throughout Laura’s natural reply to this; was silent a while; then, as she rose, she said timidly, not looking at her daughter:  “Of course Hedrick didn’t mean to tell an outright lie.  They were just talking, and perhaps he—­perhaps he heard something that made him think what he did.  People are so often mistaken in what they hear, even when they’re talking right to each other, and——­”

“Isn’t it more likely,” said Laura, gravely, “that Cora was telling some story or incident, and that Hedrick overheard that part of it, and thought she was speaking directly to Mr. Corliss?”

“Of course!” cried the mother with instant and buoyant relief; and when the three ladies convened, a little later, Cora (unquestioned) not only confirmed this explanation, but repeated in detail the story she had related to Mr. Corliss.  Laura had been quick.

Hedrick passed a variegated morning among comrades.  He obtained prestige as having a father like-to-die, but another boy turned up who had learned to chew tobacco.  Then Hedrick was pronounced inferior to others in turning “cartwheels,” but succeeded in a wrestling match for an apple, which he needed.  Later, he was chased empty-handed from the rear of an ice-wagon, but greatly admired for his retorts to the vociferous chaser:  the other boys rightly considered that what he said to the ice-man was much more horrible than what the ice-man said to him.  The ice-man had a fair vocabulary, but it lacked pliancy; seemed stiff and fastidious compared with the flexible Saxon in which Hedrick sketched a family tree lacking, perhaps, some plausibility as having produced even an ice-man, but curiously interesting zoologically.