t's shoulder went with
him to his room. How she wished that he would let her cuddle him in her
lap and sing to him and tell him stories and then hear him his prayers
at her knee and tuck him in bed as in the old days before he went to
boarding-school! Her heart ached for him, though she had no notion of
the bitterness, the rebellion, that were rankling in his. As she kissed
him goodnight she whispered,

"You shall have your swim, in the river, tomorrow, Eddie darling; I'll
see that you do."

"Don't you ask _him_ to let me do anything," he protested, passionately.
"I'm going without asking him. He disowned me for a son, I'll disown him
for a father!"

He loved her but he was glad when the door closed behind her so that he
could think it all out for himself in the dark--the dear dark that he
had always loved so well and that was now as balm to his bruised spirit.
The worst of it was that he could not disown John Allan as a father. He
had to confess to himself with renewed bitterness that he was indeed,
and by no fault of his own--a helpless dependent upon the charity of
this man who had, in taunting him with the fact, wounded him so
grievously. His impulse was to run away--but where could he go? Though
his small purse held at that moment a generous amount of spending money
for a boy "going on twelve," it would be a mere nothing toward taking
him anywhere. It would not afford him shelter and food for a day, and he
knew it--it would not take him to the only place where he knew he had
kindred--Baltimore. And what if he could get as far as Baltimore, would
he care to go there? To assert his independence of the charity of John
Allan only to throw himself upon the charity of relatives who had never
noticed him--whom he hated because they had never forgiven his father
for marrying the angel mother around whose memory his fondest dreams
clung?

No, he could not disown Mr. Allan--not yet; but the good things of life
received from his hands had henceforth lost their flavor and would be
like Dead Sea fruit upon his lips. Hitherto, though he knew, of course,
that he was not the Allans' own child, he had never once been made to
feel that he was any the less entitled to their bounty. They had adopted
him of their own free will to fill the empty arms of a woman with a
mother's heart who had never been a mother, and that woman had lavished
upon him almost more than a mother's love--certainly more than a prudent
mother's indulgence.