The verdict was, on the way home, that he behaved splendidly.

Alexander Mackenzie, the year before, had roared.
He was weeping now, at the age of seven, silently, but very copiously, behind the woodpile.

His father had finally cuffed him for importunity; and the world was no place for a just boy, who asked nothing but his rights.

Only the woodpile, friendly mossy logs unsplit, stood inconscient and irresponsible for any share in his black circumstances; and his tears fell among the lichens of the stump he was bowed on till, observing them, he began to wonder whether he could cry enough to make a pond there, and was presently disappointed to find the source exhausted.
The Murchisons were all imaginative.
The others, Oliver and Abby and Stella, still "tormented." Poor Alec's rights--to a present of pocket-money on the Queen's Birthday--were common ones, and almost statutory.

How their father, sitting comfortably with his pipe in the flickering May shadows under the golden pippin, reading the Toronto paper, could evade his liability in the matter was unfathomable to the Murchisons; it was certainly illiberal; they had a feeling that it was illegal.