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. He had been the most spoiled and petted child of
his circle, and the bounty had been heaped upon him in a manner that
made him feel--child though he was--the joy that the giving brought the
giver, and therefore no burden of obligation upon himself in receiving.
If Mr. Allan had been strict to a point of harshness with him, at times,
Mr. Allan was a born disciplinarian--it seemed natural for him to be
stern and unsympathetic and those who knew him best took his stiffness
and hardness with many grains of allowance, remembering his upright life
and his open-handed charities. He had administered punishment upon the