A shuddering seized her. Unused to giving way to her emotions, she was torn by her excited feelings almost to the verge of convulsions. She clutched the arms of her chair and set her teeth together. In her incoherent attempts at thought, as she had delved among her graves, there had occurred to her the possibility that the father might sometime take his child from her. Now this fear possessed her like a physical epilepsy. Twice she tried to speak, and only emitted a gurgling sound as if strangling. He sprang toward her, but a sudden repulsion gave her self-control. She put out her hands as if to ward him off. "Oh, my boy, my boy!" she cried, breaking out into hysterical sobs. "My boy, my boy!" She wrung her hands, and twisted them together in fierce contortions which frightened Farnsworth; but she still would not allow him to approach her. She struggled for composure, writhing in paroxysms dreadful to see. "Oh, my child!" she cried out, in a tone new and piercing; "no, no! not him! Oh, God! You cannot have my boy!" Farnsworth retreated sharply. He had not considered this. Indeed, so different was everything he found from everything he had expected, that whatever he had preconsidered was swept out of existence as irrelevant. He was confronted with a catastrophe in which it was necessary to judge unerringly and to act instantly, yet which paralyzed all his powers by its strangeness and its horror. He groped his way back to his chair and sat down, leaving the silence again unbroken save by her convulsive breathing and his deep-drawn sighs. All at once a new sound broke in upon them, and the mother started to her feet. "He is coming!" she gasped hoarsely. "I sent him away; but he has come back. He could not keep away, my beautiful boy." Her face was illumined with a love which wellnigh transfigured it. The door was opened violently, and the boy came rudely in,--a gaunt, rough whelp of a dozen summers, defiant, bold, and curious. "I knew there was something up," the young rascal observed with much self-complacency. "I knew when you sent me off to stay all night that somebody's funeral was comin' off, and I was bound I'd be here to see it." Neither the mother nor the father returned any answer. Ordinary feelings were so absolutely swept away that the woman did not even remember that she should have attempted to quiet and to excuse the intruder. Even the maternal pride which would usually have been troubled by the impression the child's rudeness must make upon her guest was overwhelmed by the greater emotion which possessed her whole being.