“Was it about William Wilkins that your father sent for you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You told him how it was?”

The boy was silent.

“He didn’t punish you, surely?”

Tears trembled on the closing lashes of the injured child; but he answered nothing.  The teacher saw how it was, and questioned him no farther.  From that time he was kinder toward his wayward and, too often, offending scholar, and gained a better influence over him.

Not for a moment, during the afternoon, was the thought that his father knew of his blamelessness absent from Andrew’s mind.  And, when he returned home, his heart beat feverishly in anticipation of the meeting between him and his parent.  He felt sure that the teacher’s note had reached his father after the punishment had been inflicted; and he expected, from an innate sense of right and justice, that some acknowledgment, grateful to his injured feelings, of the wrong he had suffered, would be made.  There was no thought of triumph or reaction against his father.  He had been wrongly judged, and cruelly punished; and all he asked for or desired was that his father should speak kindly to him, and say that he bad been blamed without a cause.  How many a dark shadow would such a gleam of sunshine have dispelled from his heart.  But no such gleam of light awaited his meeting with his father, who did not even raise his eyes to look at him as he came into his presence.

For awhile Andrew lingered in the room where his father sat reading, hoping for a word that would indicate a kinder state of feeling toward him.  But no such word was uttered.  At length he commenced playing with a younger brother, who, not being able to make him do just as he wished, screamed out some complaint against him, when Mr. Howland looked up, suddenly, with a lowering countenance, and said, harshly—­

“Go out of the room, sir!  I never saw such a boy!  No one can have any peace where you are!”

Andrew started, and made an effort to explain and excuse himself, for he was very anxious not to be misunderstood again just at this time.  But his father exclaimed, more severely than at first.

“Do you hear me, sir!  Leave this room instantly!”

The boy went out hopeless.  He felt that he was unloved by his father.  Oh! what would he not have given—­what sacrifice would he not have made—­to secure a word and a smile of affection from his stern parent, whom he had known from childhood only as one who reproved and punished.

CHAPTER IV.

Wronged and repelled, Andrew left the presence of his father, sad, hopeless, yet with a sense of indignation in his heart against that father for the wrong he had suffered at his hands.

“It’s no use for me to try to do right,” he (sic) mnrmured to himself.  “If I want to be good, they won’t let me.”

As these thoughts passed through his mind, a feeling of recklessness came over him, and he said aloud—­