me
everything I want, thank you'; and she said, 'She doesn't love you as
much as I do.' And I said (all this love talk makes me kind of sick!) I
said, 'Oh yes, she does; she loved me when I was a squealing baby! You
didn't know me then.'"

"What did she say?" Miss Lydia asked, breathlessly.

"Oh, she sort of cried," said Johnny, with a bored look.

But his perplexity about Mrs. Robertson's gush lingered in his mind, and
a year or two later, on his twentieth birthday, as it happened, he asked
Miss Lydia again what on earth it meant? . . . The Robertsons had braved
the raw Old Chester winter and come down to the old house to be near
their son on that day. They came like the Greeks, bearing gifts, which,
it being Johnny's birthday, they knew could not be refused--and old Miss
Lydia, unlike the priest of Apollo, had no spear to thrust at them
except the forbidden spear of Truth! So her heart was in her mouth when
Johnny, who had gone to supper with his father and mother, came home at
nearly midnight and told her how good they were to him. But he was
preoccupied as he talked, and once or twice he frowned. Then suddenly he
burst out:

"Aunty, why does Mr. Robertson bother about me?"

"Does he?" Miss Lydia said.

"Well, yes; he says he wants me to go into his firm when I leave
college. He says he'll give me mighty good pay. But--but he wants me to
take his name."

"_Oh!_" said Miss Lydia. She looked so little and pretty, lying there in
her bed, with her soft white hair--the frizette had vanished some years
ago--parted over her delicate furrowed brow, and her blue eyes wide and
frightened, like a child's, that Johnny suddenly hugged her.

"As for the name part of it," he said, "I said my name was Smith. Not
handsome or distinguished, but my own. I said I had no desire to change
it, but if I ever did it would be to Sampson."

A meager tear stood in the corner of Miss Lydia's eye. "That was very
nice of you, Johnny," she said, quaveringly.

"I'd like the business part of it all right," said Johnny. . . . "Say,
Aunt Lydia--what _is_ all the milk in the coconut about me? Course I'm
not grown up for nothing; I know I'm--queer. I got on to that when I was
fifteen--I put the date on Eddy Mack's nose! But I'd like to know,
really, who I am?"

"You're my boy," said Miss Lydia.

"You bet I am!" said Johnny; "but who were my father and mother?"

"They lived out West, and--"

"I know all that fairy tale, Aunty. Let's hav