AFTER Mr. Smith's death the Robertsons stayed on in Old Chester to close the house. Mary hardly left it, even to walk in the garden behind the circling brick wall. But she sent her husband on innumerable errands into Old Chester, and when he came back she would say, "Did you see —him?"

And sometimes Johnny's father would say, "Yes."

"You didn't speak to him?" she would ask, in a panic.

"Of course not! But he's an attractive boy." Once he added, "Why don't you go and call on Miss Lydia – and see him yourself?"

She caught her soft hands together in terror. "Go to Miss Lydia's? I? Oh, I couldn't! Oh, Carl, don't you see —I might like him!"

"You couldn't help it if you saw him."

"That's just it! I don't want to like him. Nothing would induce me to see him."

Yet there came a moment when the urge of maternity was greater than the instinct of secrecy, greater even than the fear of awakening in herself that "liking" which would inevitably mean pain. She and Johnny's father were to leave Old Chester the next day; for a week she had been counting the hours until they would start, and she could turn her back on this gnawing temptation! But when that last day came, she vacillated: "I'll just walk down and look at Miss Lydia's; he might be going in or coming out… No! I won't; he might see me, and think – .. I must – I must… Oh, I can't, I won't!" Yet in the late afternoon she slipped out of the house and went stealthily down the carriage road, and, standing in the shadow of one of the great stone gateposts, stared over at Miss Lydia's open door. As she stood there she heard a sound. Her heart leaped – and fell, shuddering. Just once in her life had she felt that elemental pang; it was when another sound, the little, thin cry of birth pierced her ears. Now the sound was of laughter, the shrill, cracking laughter of an adolescent boy. She crept back to the big house, so exhausted that she said to old Alfred, "Tell Mr. Robertson that I have a headache, and am lying down."

Later, when her husband, full of concern at her discomfort, came upstairs to sit on the edge of her bed and ask her how she felt, she told him what had happened.

"I wouldn't see him for anything," she said, gasping; "even his voice just about killed me! Oh, Carl, suppose I were to like him? Oh, what shall I do? —I don't want to like him."

"Why, my dear, it would be all right if you did," he tried to reassure her. "There's no reason why you shouldn't see him once in a while – and like him, too. I like him, though I haven't spoken to him. But I'm going to."

"Oh, Carl, don't – " she besought him.

But he said: "Don't worry. You know I would never do anything rash."

And the next day he stopped boldly at Miss Lydia's door, and talked about the weather, and gave Johnny a dollar.

"Go downstreet and buy something," he said.

And Johnny said, "Thank you, sir!" and went off, whistling.

"He's a promising boy," Mr. Robertson said, in a low voice.

Miss Lydia was extremely nervous during this five minutes. She had been nervous during the weeks that Mary and Carl were up there in the big house. Suppose they should see just how "promising" Johnny was – and want him? – and say they would take him? Then she would reassure herself: "They can only take their son – and they don't want him!" Yet she was infinitely relieved when, the next day, the Smith house was finally closed and the "For Sale or To Let" sign put up on the iron gates that shut the graveled driveway from Old Chester's highroad.

"They'll sell the house and never come back," she told herself. And indeed Johnny was a year older, a year more plucky and high-tempered and affectionate, before Miss Lydia had any further cause for uneasiness.

Then, suddenly, Mr. Carl Robertson appeared in town; he came, he said, to make sure that the still unsold Smith house was not getting dilapidated. While he was looking it over he took occasion to tell several people that that boy who lived with the old lady in the house by the gate was an attractive youngster.

"I suppose," said Mr. Robertson, "Mary ought to sell that house to settle the estate, but she says she won't turn the old lady out. The little beggar she takes care of seems a nice little chap." Then he said, casually, "Who were his father and mother?"

"That's what nobody knows," some one said; then added, significantly, "Lydia is very secretive." And some one else said, "There is a suspicion that the child is her own."

"Her own?" Carl Robertson gaped, open-mouthed. And when he turned his back on this particular gossip his face was darkly red. "Somebody in this town needs a horse-whipping!" he told himself; "God forbid that Miss Sampson knows there are such fools in the world!" He was so angry and ashamed that his half-formed wish to do something for the child crystallized into purpose. But before he made any effort to carry his purpose out he discounted public opinion. "Nothing like truth to throw people off the track," he reflected. So, with the frankness which may be such a perfect screen for lack of candor, he put everybody he met off the track by saying he was going to give Miss Lydia a hand in bringing up that boy of hers.

"Very generous," said Mrs. Barkley, and told Old Chester that the fat Mr. Robertson was an agreeable person, and she did wonder why his father-in-law had not got along with him!

"The reason I spoke of it to Mrs. Barkley," Carl Robertson told Miss Lydia, "was that I knew she'd inform everybody in town. So that if, later on, I want to see the – the boy, once in a while, it won't set people gossiping."

It was the night before he was leaving Old Chester that he said this. They were in Miss Lydia's parlor; the door was closed, for Johnny was in the dining room, doing his examples, one leg around the leg of his chair, his tongue out, and breathing heavily: "Farmer Jones sold ten bushels of wheat at – "

"I do want to see more of him," Mr. Robertson said; "and I want Mary to."

"Do you?" said Miss Lydia.

"Well, he's ours, and – "

"He's his father's and mother's," she conceded; "they would naturally want to see him."

"Yes," Carl Robertson said; "but of course we could never do more than that. We could never have him."

Miss Lydia felt her legs trembling, and she put her hands under her black silk apron lest they might tremble, too. "No," she agreed, "I suppose you couldn't."

He nodded. "It would be impossible; people must never suspect – " He stopped through sheer shame at the thought of all the years he had hidden behind this small, scared-looking woman, who had had no place to hide from a ridiculous but pursuing suspicion.

When he got back to Philadelphia and told his wife about the boy, he said, "Some of those old cats in Old Chester actually thought he was – her own child."

"What!"

"Fools. But, Mary, she never betrayed us – that little old woman! She never told the truth."

"She never knew it was said."

"God knows, I hope she didn't… We ought to have kept him."

"Carl! You know we couldn't; it would have been impossible!"

"Well, we cared more for our reputations than for our – son," he said.

For a moment that poignant word startled Mary into silence; then she said, breathlessly: "But, Carl, that isn't common sense! What about – the boy himself? Would it have been a good thing for him that people should know?"

"It might have been a good thing for us," he said; "and it couldn't be any worse for him than it is. Everybody thinks he's illegitimate." He paused, and then he said a really profound thing – for a fat, selfish man. "Mary, I believe there isn't any real welfare that's built on a lie. If it was to do over again I'd stand up to my own cussed folly."

"You don't seem to consider me!" she said, bitterly.

But he only said, slowly, "He's the finest little chap you ever saw."

"Pretty?" she said, forgetting her bitterness.

"Oh, he's a boy, a real boy. Freckled. And when he's mad he shows his teeth, just as your father used to; I saw him in a fight. No; of course he's not 'pretty.'"

"I'd like to see him – if I wasn't afraid to," she said. She was thirty-four now, a sad, idle, rich woman, with only three interests in life: eating and shopping and keeping the Secret which made her cringe whenever she thought of it, which, since the night she heard Johnny laugh, was pretty much all the time. It was the shopping interest that by and by united with the interest of the Secret; it occurred to her that she might give "him" something. She would buy him a pair of skates! "But you must send them to him, Carl."

"Why don't you do it yourself?"

"It would look queer. People might – think."

"Well, they 'thought' about that poor little woman."

"Idiots! She's a hundred years old!" Mary said, jealously.

"She wasn't when he was born," her husband said, wearily. He probably loved his wife, but since that day when she had flung away the lure of mystery, her mind had ceased to interest him. This was cruel and unjust, but it was male human nature.

"Why don't you get acquainted with the youngster?" Carl said, yawning.

"Carl! You know it wouldn't do. Besides, how could I?"

"We could take the house ourselves next summer. There's some furniture in it still. It would come about naturally enough. And he would be at our gates."

"Oh no —no! Maybe he looks like me."

"No, he doesn't. Didn't I tell you he isn't particularly good-looking?"

"Maybe he looks like you?" she objected, simply.

And he laughed, and said, "Thank you, my dear!"

But Mary didn't laugh. She got up and stood staring out of the window into the rainy street; "You send him the skates," she said; "you've seen him, so it wouldn't seem queer."

The skates were sent, and Johnny's mother was eager to see Johnny's smudgy and laborious letter acknowledging "Mr. Robertson's kind present."

"That's a very nice little letter!" she said; "he must be clever, like you. I'll buy some books for him."

That was in January. By April Johnny and his books and his multiplication table and his freckles were almost constantly in her mind. It was about the middle of April that she said to her husband:

"If you haven't a tenant, I suppose we might open father's house for a month? Perhaps being there would be better than – giving presents? If I saw him just once I shouldn't want to give him things."

"I'm afraid you'd want to more than ever," he demurred, which, of course, made her protest:

"Oh no, I shouldn't! Do let's do it!"

"Well," he conceded, in triumphant reluctance – for it was what he had wanted her to say – "if you insist. But I don't believe you'll like it."

So that was how it happened that the weatherworn "For Sale or To Let" sign was taken down, and the rusty iron gates were opened, and the weedy graveled driveway made clean and tidy as it used to be in Johnny's grandfather's time. Johnny himself was immensely interested in all that went on in the way of renovation, and in the beautiful horses that came down before Mr. and Mrs. Robertson arrived.

"Aunty, they must be pretty rich," he said.

"They are," said Miss Lydia.

"I guess if they had a boy they'd give him a pony," Johnny said, sighing.

"Very likely," Miss Lydia told him. And she, too, watched the opening up of the big house with her frightened blue eyes.

"Lydia, you're losing flesh," Mrs. Barkley said in an anxious bass. Indeed, all Old Chester was anxious about Miss Sampson's looks that summer. "What is the matter?" said Old Chester.

But Miss Lydia, although she really did grow thin, never said what was the matter.

"I do dislike secretiveness!" said Mrs. Drayton; "I call it vulgar."

"I wonder what she calls curiosity?" Doctor Lavendar said when this remark was repeated to him.

Miss Lydia may have been vulgar, but her vulgarity did not save her from terror. When Mary drove past the little house, the Grasshopper's heart was in her mouth! Would Johnny's mother stop? – or would Mrs. Robertson go by? There came, of course, the inevitable day when the mother stopped… It was in June, a day of white clouds racing in a blue sky, and tree tops bending and swaying and locust blossoms showering on the grass. Johnny was engaged in trying to lure his cat out of a pear tree, into which a dog had chased her.

"Stop!" Mary Robertson called to the coachman; then, leaning forward, she tried to speak. Her breath came with a gasp. "Are you the – the boy who lives with Miss Sampson?"

"Yes'm," Johnny said. "Kitty, Kitty!" Then he called: "Say, Aunty! Let's try her with milk!"

Miss Lydia, coming to the door with a saucer of milk, stood for a paralyzed moment, then she said, "How do you do, Mary?"

"You haven't forgotten me?" Mrs. Robertson said.

"Well, no," said Miss Lydia.

"Lovely day," Mary said, breathing quickly; then she waved a trembling hand. "Good-by! Go on, Charles." Charles flicked his whip and off she rumbled in the very same old victoria in which her father had rolled by Miss Lydia's door in the September dusk some fifteen years before.

That night Johnny's mother said to her husband, almost in a whisper, "I – spoke to him."

He put a kindly arm around her. "Isn't he as fine a boy as you ever saw?"

After that Mrs. Robertson spoke to Johnny Smith frequently and Miss Lydia continued to lose flesh. The month that Mr. and Mrs. Robertson were to spend in Old Chester lengthened into two – into three. And while they were there wonderful things happened to Johnny in the way of presents – a lathe, a velocipede, a little engine to turn a wheel in the run at the foot of old Mr. Smith's pasture. Also, he and his aunt Lydia were invited to take supper with Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. "We'll have to ask her," Johnny's mother had said to Johnny's father, "because it would look queer to have him come by himself. Oh, Carl, I am beginning to hate her!"

"You mustn't, dear; she's good to him."

"I want to be good to him!"

However, Miss Lydia, in her once-turned and twice-made-over blue silk, came and sat at the big table in the new Mr. Smith's dining room. She hardly spoke, but just sat there, the vein on her temple throbbing with fright, and listened to Johnny's mother pouring herself out in fatuous but pathetic flattery and in promises of all sorts of delights.

"Mary, my dear!" Carl Robertson protested, but he felt the pain of the poor, child-hungry woman at the other end of the table.

When Miss Lydia and Johnny walked home together in the darkness her boy said: "A fellow'd be lucky with a mother like that, wouldn't he? She'd give him everything he wanted. She'd give him a pony," Johnny said, wistfully.

"Yes," said Miss Lydia, faintly.

"Wish I had a mother who'd gimme a pony," Johnny said, with the brutal honesty of his sex and years.

And Miss Lydia said again, "Yes."

"Maybe Mrs. Robertson'll gimme one," Johnny said, hopefully; "she's always giving me things!"

However, though Johnny's gratitude consisted of a lively hope of benefits to come, he had some opinions of his own.

"She kisses me," he said to Miss Lydia, wrinkling up his nose. "I don't like kissing ladies."

Poor Mary couldn't help kissing him. The fresh, honest, ugly young face had become more wonderful to her than anything else on earth! But sometimes she looked at him and then at his father, and said to herself, "His eyes are not like Carl's, but his mouth is as Carl's used to be before he wore a beard; but nobody would know it now."

Mr. Robertson looked pleased when she told him, anxiously, that "it was showing – the likeness. He has your mouth. And people might – "

"I wish to God I could own him," said Carl Robertson.

"Carl, he wants a pony! Buy one for him."

But Johnny didn't get his pony, because when Mr. Robertson told Miss Lydia he was thinking of buying a horse for his boy, she said:

"No; it isn't good for him, please, to have so many things."

"The idea of her interfering!" Mary told her husband.