. Frances Allan
trembled. Rising from the child's side, she clasped her husband's arm in
both her hands.

"Don't, John! Don't, please, John dear. I can't stand it," she breathed.
He put her aside, firmly.

"Don't be silly, Frances. You are interfering with my duty. Can't you
see that I must teach the boy to make you a better return for your
kindness than lying to hide his mischief?"

"But suppose that he is telling the truth, John, and that he has been
doing nothing worse than wandering about the streets? You know the way
he has always had of roaming about by himself, at times."

"And do you think roaming about the streets at this time of night proper
employment for a boy of eleven? Would you have him grow up into a
vagabond? A boy dependent upon the bounty of strangers can ill afford to
cultivate such idle habits!"

The boy's already large and dark pupils dilated and darkened until his
eyes looked like black, storm-swept pools. His already white face grew
livid. He drew back as if he had been struck and fixed upon his
foster-father a gaze in which every spark of affection was, for the
moment, dead. He had been humiliated by the threat of a flogging, but
the prospect of the hardest stroke his body might receive was as nothing
to him now. His sensitive soul had been smitten a blow the smart of
which he would carry with him to his last day. "Dependent upon the
bounty of strangers,"--_of strangers!_

Up to this time he had been the darling little son of an over-fond
mother, and though his foster-father had been at times, stern and
unsympathetic with him, no hint had ever before dropped from him to
indicate that the child was not as much his own as the sons of other
fathers were their own--that he was not as much entitled to the good
things of life which were heaped upon him without the asking as an own
son would have been. His comforts--his pleasures had been so easily, so
plentifully bestowed that the little dreamer had never before awaked to
a realization of a difference between his relation with his parents and
the relation of other children with theirs. Brought face to face with
this hard, cold fact for the first time, and so suddenly, he was for the
moment stunned by it. He felt that a flood of deep waters in which he
was floundering helplessly was overwhelming him.

A deep silence had followed the last words of Mr. Allan, who continued
to trim the switch, while his wife, sinking into a chair, bowed her
face