f he had struck her, and shrank away behind her
mother, hiding her face in her hands.

"I am, more or less, of your opinion, John. I have told her the same.
While he was a baby it mattered nothing, now that he is a rational
creature with an opinion of his own, like any one of us----"

"Mother," cried Elinor, "you are unkind. Oh, you are unkind! What did it
matter so long as he was a baby? But now he is just at the age when he
would be--if you don't wish to drive me out of my senses altogether,
don't say a word more to me of this kind."

"Elinor," said John, "I have said nothing on the subject for many years,
though I have thought much: and you must for once hear reason. The boy
belongs--to his father as much as to you. I have said it! I cannot take
it back. He belongs to the family of which he may one day be the head.
You cannot throw away his birthright. And think, if you let him grow up
like this, not knowing that he has a family or a--unaware whom he
belongs to."

"Have you done, John?" asked Elinor, who had made two or three efforts
to interrupt, and had been beating her foot impatiently upon the ground.

"If you ask me in that tone, I suppose I must say yes: though I have a
great deal more that I should like to say."

"Then hear me speak," cried Elinor. "Of us three at least, I am the
only one to whom he belongs. I only have power to decide for him. And I
say, No, no: whatever argument there may be, whatever plea you may bring
forward, No and no, and after that No! What! at fourteen, just the age
when anything that was said to him would tell the most; when he would
learn a lesson the quickest, learn what I would die to keep him from!
When he would take everything for gospel that was said to him, when the
very charm of--of that unknown name----"

She stopped for a moment to take breath, half choked by her own words.

"And you ought to remember no one has ever laid claim to him. Why should
I tell him of one that never even inquired---- No, John, no, no, no!
A baby he might have been told, and it would have done him no harm.
Perhaps you were right, you and mother, and I was wrong. He might have
known it from the first, and thought very little of it, and he may know
when he is a man, and his character is formed and he knows what things
mean--but a boy of fourteen! Imagine the glamour there would be about
the very name; how he would feel we must all have been unjust and
the--the other injured. You know from your