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