m through the window, and wondering if
in heaven there were hunchback boys like him, he overheard his
father talking to his mother, and the words that his father said
were never forgotten to his dying day. There were, "Don't ask me to
be reconciled to a cripple! What good can he do me? He will never
earn his own living, lame as he is, and will only be in the way."

"Oh, father, father," the cripple essayed to say, but he could not
speak, so full of pain was his little, bursting heart, and that
night he lay awake, praying that he might die and so be out of the
way.

The next morning he asked Maude to draw him to the churchyard where
"his other mother," as he called her, was buried. Maude complied,
and when they were there, placed him at his request upon the ground,
where stretching himself out at his full length, he said: "Look,
Maude, won't mine be a little grave?" then, ere she could answer the
strange question, he continued, "I want to die so bad; and if you
leave me lying here in the long grass maybe God's angel will take me
up to heaven. Will I be lame, there, think you?"

"Oh, Louis, Louis, what do you mean?" cried Maude, and as well as he
could, for the tears he shed, Louis told her what he meant.

"Father don't love me because I'm lame, and he called me a cripple,
too. What is a cripple, Maude? Is it anything very bad?" and his
beautiful brown eyes turned anxiously toward his sister.

He had never heard that word before, and to him it had a fearful
significance, even worse than lameness. In an instant Maude knelt by
his side--his head was pillowed on her bosom, and in the silent
graveyard, with the quiet dead around them, she spoke blessed words
of comfort to her brother, telling him what a cripple was, and that
because he bore that name he was dearer far to her.

"Your father will love you, too," she said, "when he learns how good
you are. He loves Nellie, and--"

Ere she could say more she was interrupted by Louis, on whose mind
another truth had dawned, and who now said, "But he don't love you
as he does Nellie. Why not? Are you a cripple, too?"

Folding him still closer in her arms, and kissing his fair, white
brow, Maude answered: "Your father, Louis, is not mine--for mine is
dead, and his grave is far away. I came here to live when I was a
little girl, not quite as old as you, and Nellie is not my sister,
though you are my darling brother."

"And do you love father?" asked Louis, his eyes still f