‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Gilbert, disrespectfully indeed, but from the bottom of his heart, and breaking at once into a flood of tears. ‘You are the only creature that has been kind to me since I lost my mother and Ned, and now they have been and turned you against me too;’ and he sobbed violently. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Gilbert. If I stand in your mother’s place, I can’t be turned against you, any more than she could,’ and she stroked his brow, which she found so throbbing as to account for his paleness. ‘You can grieve and hurt me, but you can’t prevent me from feeling for you, nor for your dear father’s grief.’ He declared that people at home knew nothing about boys, and made an uproar about nothing. ‘Do you call falsehood nothing?’ ‘Falsehood! A mere trifle now and then, when I am driven to it by being kept so strictly.’ ‘I don’t know how to talk to you, Gilbert,’ said Albinia, rising; ‘your conscience knows better than your tongue.’ ‘Don’t go;’ and he went off into another paroxysm of crying, as he caught hold of her dress; and when he spoke again his mood was changed; he was very miserable, nobody cared for him, he did not know what to do; he wanted to do right, and to please her, but Archie Tritton would not let him alone; he wished he had never seen Archie Tritton. At last, walking up and down with him, she drew from him a full confidence, and began to understand how, when health and strength had come back to him in greater measure than he had ever before enjoyed, the craving for boyish sports had awakened, just after he had been deprived of his brother, and was debarred from almost every wholesome manner of gratifying it. To fall in with young Tritton was as great a misfortune as could well have befallen a boy, with a dreary home, melancholy, reserved father, and wearisome aunt. Tritton was a youth of seventeen, who had newly finished his education at an inferior commercial school, and lived on his father’s farm, giving himself the airs of a sporting character, and fast hurrying into dissipation.