Then Doctor Prescott, no whit disturbed, turned to Jerome and looked at him.  Jerome made his manners again.  “You are the Edwards boy, aren’t you?” said the doctor.

Jerome humbly acknowledged his identity.

“What do you want?  Has your mother sent you on an errand?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“Please, sir, may I speak to you a minute?”

“Speak to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Doctor Prescott wore a massive gold watch-chain festooned across his fine black satin vest.  He pulled out before the boy’s wondering and perplexed eyes the great gold timepiece attached to it and looked at it.  “You must be quick,” said he.  “I have to go in five minutes.  I will give you five minutes by my watch.  Begin.”

But poor little Jerome, thus driven with such a hard check-rein of time, paled and reddened and trembled, and could find no words.

“One minute is gone,” said the doctor, looking over the open face of his watch at Jerome.  Something in his glance spurred on the frightened boy by arousing a flash of resentment.

Jerome, standing straight before the doctor, with a little twitching hand hanging at each side, with his color coming and going, and pulses which could be seen beating hard in his temples and throat, spoke and delivered himself of that innocently overreaching scheme which he had propounded to Squire Eben Merritt.

It seems probable that mental states have their own reflective powers, which sometimes enable one to suddenly see himself in the conception of another, to the complete modification of all his own ideas and opinions.  So little Jerome Edwards, even while speaking, began to see his plan as it looked to Doctor Prescott, and not as it had hitherto looked to himself.  He began to understand and to realize the flaws in it—­that he had asked more of Doctor Prescott than he would grant.  Still, he went on, and the doctor heard him through without a word.

“Who put you up to this?” the doctor asked, when he had finished.

“Nobody, sir.”

“Your mother?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you ever hear your father propose anything like this?”

“No, sir.”

“Who did?  Speak the truth.”

“I did.”

“You thought out this plan yourself?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look at me.”

Jerome, flushing with angry shame at his own simplicity as revealed to him by this other, older, superior intellect, yet defiant still at this attack upon his truth, looked the doctor straight in his keen eyes.

“Are you speaking the truth?”

“Yes, sir.”

Still the doctor looked at him, and Jerome would not cast his eyes down, nor, indeed, could.  He felt as if his very soul were being stretched up on tiptoe to the doctor’s inspection.

“Children had better follow the wisdom of their elders,” said the doctor.  He would not even deign to explain to this boy the absurdity of his scheme.