In his absence his wife fell upon the neck of the pale, frowning child, covering his face and his curly head with kisses, and beseeching him with honeyed endearments, to be a good boy and obey his father.  But the little figure seemed to have turned to stone in her arms.  In less than the five minutes Mr. Allan was back in the room, trimming a long switch cut from one of the trees in the garden as he came.

“Are you ready to tell me the truth?” he demanded.

No answer.

Still trimming the switch, he approached the boy.  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 in her arms, folded upon the table, and began to cry softly.  The gentle sounds of her weeping seemed but further to infuriate her husband.