cruel!" he said, moved by a strength of emotion that was
unusual in him--"hard and cruel!"

Mrs. Errington made no reply. She had gained her point, and cared for
little else.

"You'll repent this some day," Horace continued.

He was in a passion, and scarcely knew what he was saying. Strings
seemed drawn tightly round his heart, and angry tears rose to his eyes.

"You'll repent it, I bet!" he added.

Then he relapsed into silence, feeling that if he spoke again he would
lose all the self-control that a boy of sixteen thinks so much of.

All that day Horace thought incessantly of the beggar, and felt an
increasing sense of anger against his mother. He found himself looking
furtively at her, as one looks at a stranger, and thinking her face hard
and pitiless. She seemed to him as someone whom he had never really
known till now, as some one whom, now that he knew her, he feared. Why
his mind dwelt so perpetually upon a casual beggar he couldn't
understand. But so it was. He saw perpetually the man's white face,
fierce and ashamed eyes, the gesture at once hungry and abashed with
which he asked for charity. All day the vision haunted the boy in the
sunshine.

Mrs. Errington, on her part, calmly ignored the incident of the morning
and appeared not to notice any change in her son's demeanour. In the
evening Captain Hindford came to dine. He was struck by Horace's
glumness, and in his frank way openly chaffed the boy about it.

"What's up with this young scoundrel?" he said to Mrs. Errington.

Horace grew very red.

"Horace is not very well to-day," said his mother.

"Mater, that's not true--I'm all right."

"I think it more charitable to suppose you seedy," she replied.

"Charitable!" Horace cried. "Well, Mater, what on earth do you know
about charity?"

Captain Hindford began to look embarrassed, and endeavoured to change
the subject, but Horace suddenly burst out into the story of the
beggar.

"It was just after you left us," he said to the Captain.

"I saw the fellow following you," the Captain said. Then he turned to
Mrs. Errington. "These chaps are the plague of the Park," he added.

"Exactly. That is what I tell Horace."

"I don't care!" the boy said stoutly. "He _was_ starving, and we were
brutes not to give him something. The Mater'll be sorry for it some day.
I know it. I can feel it."

Captain Hindford began to talk about French plays rather hastily.

When Mrs. Errington went up to the drawi