ad said about being called Sampson had been
like a knife-thrust in their hearts. It made Mary Robertson so angry
that she sprang at a fierce retaliation: "She _couldn't_ keep him--he
wouldn't stay with her--if we told him the truth!" she said to Johnny's
father.

"But we never can tell him," Carl reminded her.

"Sometimes I think she'll drive me to it!" said Mary.

"No," Robertson said, shortly.

"No one would know it but the boy himself. And if he knew it he'd let us
adopt him. And that would mean taking his own name."

"No!" Carl broke out, "it won't do! You see, I--don't want him to know."
He paused, then seemed to pull the words out with a jerk: "I won't let
him have any disrespect for his mother, and--" He got up and tramped
about the room. "Damn it! _I_ don't want to lose his good opinion,
myself."

Her face turned darkly red. "Oh," she cried, passionately, "'opinion'!
What difference does his 'opinion' make to me? A mother is a mother. And
I love him! Oh, I love him so, I could just _die_! If he would put his
arms around me the way he does to that terrible Miss Lydia, and kiss
me, and say"--she clenched her hands and closed her eyes, and whispered
the word she hungered to hear--"'_Mother! Mother!_' If I could hear him
say _that_," she said, "I could just lie down and die! Couldn't you?--to
hear him say 'Father'?"

Robertson set his teeth. "And what kind of an idea would he have of his
'father'? No, I won't consent to it!"

"We can't get him in any other way," she urged.

"Then we'll never get him. I can't face it."

"You don't love him as much as I do!"

"I love him enough not to want to risk losing his respect."

But this sentiment was beyond Johnny's mother; all she thought of was
her aching hunger for the careless, good-humored, but bored young man.
The hunger for him grew and grew; it gnawed at her day and night. She
urged Carl to take a house in Princeton while Johnny was in college, and
only Johnny's father's common sense kept this project from being carried
out. "You're afraid!" she taunted him.

"Dear," he said, kindly, "I'm afraid of being an ass. If he saw us
tagging after him he'd hate us both. He's a man!" Carl said, proudly.
"No, I've no fancy for losing the regard of"--he paused--"my son," he
said, very quietly.

His wife put her hand over her mouth and stared at him; the word was too
great for her; it was her baby she thought of, not her son.

In Johnny's first vacation, when she