took 'Rory Lane by the arm again and off they went, and right soon they
was in their house--them two, the milliner and her boy.

"And Joel Tarbush he heard him call her 'Mom' right there--that's how it
all begun to git out.

"That's right--this was the town milliner and the boy she sent away,
that never died none at all nohow.--'Rory Lane, and her boy we all
thought was dead. And we'd never knowed it nor dreamed it till he spoke,
right there in the public square! 'My mother!' says he. Can you beat
that?

"Then 'Rory Lane turns around and fronts the whole lot of them. Says
she: 'Yes, it's true! This is my son, Dewdonny Lane,' says she. She said
it cold.

"That was before we knowed all about how she had put him through
college, and that this was his first visit home, and the first time he'd
ever seen her--his own mother! I heard as how he'd thought all his life
he was a orphan, and someone on the inside that very week--just when
he'd finished in college--had wrote him that he wasn't no orphan, but
had a mother living right here! So here he comes, hot foot--and didn't
he spill the beans!

"She'd tried her durnedest to keep it all covered up--and you must say
she'd made one big fight of it, fer it's hard fer a woman to keep her
eyes and her hands off of her own flesh and blood, even if it ain't
legal. But, somehow, it's hard to keep that sort of thing covered up,
for a woman. It all comes out, time'n again--ain't it the truth? How she
done it for twenty years is a miracle. But law! What's twenty years,
come to forgettin' things like what she done?"

CHAPTER II

AURORA LANE

While the doughty town marshal, endowed now with a courage long foreign
to his nature, was leading away his sobbing prisoner, followed by the
prisoner's dazed yet angered parent, these other two, mother and son,
continued rapidly on their way toward the home of Aurora Lane. The young
man walked in silence, his enthusiasm stilled, although he held his
mother's hand tight and close as it lay upon his arm. His face, frowning
and stern, seemed suddenly grown strangely older.

They arrived at the corner of the tawny grassplot of the courthouse
yard, crossed the street once more, and turned in at the long shady lane
of maples which made off from that corner of the square. Here, just in
the neutral strip between business and residence property, opposite a
wagon-making and blacksmith shop, and adjoining the humble abode of a
day-laborer, th