Those words were spoken by her to give him pleasure, and he said what he did to give her pleasure.
To give her pleasure! the reader will perhaps say, with some surprise, thinking that to assign such a motive as that is not, by any means, putting a fair and proper construction upon the boy's act.

His design was, it will be said, to shield himself from censure, or to procure undeserved praise.
And it is, no doubt, true that, on a nice analysis of the motives of the act, such as we, in our maturity, can easily make, we shall find that design obscurely mingled with them.

But the child does not analyze.

He can not.

He does not look forward to ultimate ends, or look for the hidden springs that lie concealed among the complicated combinations of impulses which animate him.