eople 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 sa