This reasoning silenced Janet, though it did not convince her. She did not know what reply to make. A boy’s code of honour was a thing she did not understand, and she had always been accustomed to serious discrepancies between his ideas of what was meant by a promise and her own. Their training had been the same, but Janet had always dumbly in the depths of her mind put a different meaning to words from that which Tom adopted. It was possible that his point of view might be right--for him--about giving one’s word to a master, or to Beau; but her mind returned to the question that concerned herself with a keener sentiment. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said; ‘but you needn’t surely have said it was me?’ ‘Why, I did it--to please you!’ cried Tom. ‘I thought you’d rather. They can’t do anything to you. And _you_ never promised. And they can do a deal to me,’ said the boy reflectively. ‘They can stop all my fun--or nearly. They’ve got all my money, and whatever I say it does matter. People will take Beau’s word sooner than mine. But they can do nothing to you, a girl at home. Mother would never put you on bread and water, or shut you up in your room, or that sort of thing. You’ll have a jaw, and that will be all. Now they would never let me off with a jaw. I thought you’d be the first to say I should put it upon you, Jan.’ Once more Janet was silenced. She felt vaguely that to take it upon herself and to have the blame thrown upon her by another were two different things: but at the same time she felt the imputation of not having put herself in the breach at once to defend her brother. She had done so to her own consciousness, falteringly putting forth Charlie Blackmore’s fib. But Tom did not know that, and he thought her ungenerous, wanting to vindicate herself, not ready to screen him, so that she was silenced on all sides of the question, and could not make any stand. But in her heart Janet still felt the startling pang with which she heard him make his excuse. No doubt there had been already similar crises in her life: but she was no longer in the nursery age. This made her less anxious for his company during the rest of his stay before he went back to school, though Janet was staunch to his side, and refused to breathe a word to his disadvantage, even during the serious ‘jaw’ which she received. Lady Car’s ‘jaw’ however was very mild. She put her arm around the passively resisting girl, and talked to her of what was a woman’s duty. ‘A sister is such a thing for a boy,’ she said. ‘Often when he will not listen to anybody with authority he will listen to his sister; if, instead of going with him on wild expeditions, she tries to persuade him the other way--rather to go with her.’ Janet listened with a great sense of wrong in her heart, but she restrained everything that would harm Tom. All that she said was-- ‘We went out merely for a ride, mother. We did not mean--to go anywhere.’