t is a proof of your goodness. I have never
deserved it. I don't now--but you never fail me." Her voice was clearer
now--her cheeks, too, had regained some of their color. Harry listened
wonderingly, his arm still around her.

"I couldn't do anything else, Annie--nobody could under the
circumstances." His voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

"But it was for me you did it, St. George. I would rather think of it
that way; it makes it easier. Say you did it for me."

St. George stooped down, raised her thin white hand to his lips, kissed
it reverently, and without a word of any kind walked to the door of his
bedroom and shut it behind him.

Mrs. Rutter's hand dropped to her lap and a smile of intense relief
passed over her face. She neither looked after St. George, nor did she
offer any explanation to Harry; she merely bent forward and continued
her caresses, stroking the boy's glossy hair, patting the white temples
with her delicate fingers, smoothing the small, well-set ears and the
full brown throat, kissing his forehead, her eyes reading his face,
wondering if she had spoken too freely and yet regretting nothing: what
she had said had come straight from her heart and she was not ashamed of
it.

The boy lay still, his head against her breast. That his mother had been
stirred even in a greater degree over what St. George had said to her
than she had been by his father's treatment of him was evident in the
trembling movement of the soft hands caressing his hair and in the way
her breath came and went. Under her soothing touch his thoughts went
back to the events of the morning:--his uncle's defiant tones as he
denounced his father; his soft answer to his mother; her pleading words
in reply, and then the reverent kiss.

Suddenly, clear as the tones of a far-off convent bell sifting down
from some cloud-swept crag, there stole into his mind a memory of his
childhood--a legend of long ago, vague and intangible--one he could not
put into words--one Alec had once hinted at. He held his breath trying
to gather up the loose ends--to make a connected whole; to fit the parts
together. Then, as one blows out a candle, leaving total darkness, he
banished it all from his mind.

"Mother dear!--mother dear!" he cried tenderly, and wound his arms the
closer about her neck.

She gathered him up as she had done in the old days when he was a child
at her breast; all the intervening years seemed blotted out. He was her
baby boy