to his mother. With even, passionless voice, with almost no sign of
penitence, he told her the story of the day's truancy.

As her discriminating eye was quick in discerning his penitence, so her
forgiveness was quick in meeting his sin. But though her forgiveness
brought the boy a certain measure of relief he seemed almost to take it
for granted, and there still remained on his face a look of pain and
of more than pain that puzzled his mother. He seemed to be in a maze
of uncertainty and doubt and fear. His mother could not understand his
distress, for Larry had told her nothing of his encounter with Mop.
Throughout the evening there pounded through the boy's memory the
terrible words, "He is a coward and his mother is a coward before him."
Through his father's prayer at evening worship those words continued to
beat upon his brain. He tried to prepare his school lessons for the day
following, but upon the page before his eyes the same words took shape.
He could not analyse his unutterable sense of shame. He had been afraid
to fight. He knew he was a coward, but there was a deeper shame in which
his mother was involved. She was a Quaker, he knew, and he had a more
or less vague idea that Quakers would not fight. Was she then a coward?
That any reflection should be made upon his mother stabbed him to the
heart. Again and again Mop's sneering, grinning face appeared before
his eyes. He felt that he could have gladly killed him in the woods, but
after all, the paralysing thought ever recurred that what Mop said was
true. His mother was a coward! He put his head down upon his books and
groaned aloud.

"What is it, dear?" inquired his mother.

"I am going to bed, mother," he said.