"Money!" he said. "They paid you to take me off their hands?" He paused; "Aunt Lydia," he said--and as he spoke his upper lip lifted and she saw his teeth--"Aunt Lydia, I'll never ask you about them again. I have no interest in them. They are nothing to me, just as I was nothing to them. But tell me one thing, is Smith my name?" "Yes," said Miss Lydia (it's his _middle_ name, she assured herself truthfully). But Johnny laughed: "I guess you just called me Smith. Well, that's all right, though I'd rather you'd made it Sampson. But Smith will do. I said so to Mrs. Robertson. I said that my name was the same as her father's, and I thought he was the finest old man I'd ever known, and, though I was no relation, I hoped my Smith name would be as dignified as his." "What did she say?" said Miss Lydia. "Oh, she got weepy," said Johnny, good-naturedly; "she's always either crying or kissing. But she's kind. Look at those!" he said, displaying some sleeve links that his mother's soft, adoring fingers had fastened into his cuffs. "Well, I don't take a berth with a new name tacked on to it, at Robertson & Carey's. He'll have to get some other fellow to swap names for him!" He went off to his room, his face still dark with the deep, elemental anger which that word "deserted" had stirred in him, but whistling as if to declare his entire indifference to the deserters. Old Miss Lydia, alone, trembled very much. "Take their name! _What will they do next?_" she said to herself. The Robertsons were asking each other the same question, "What can we do now to get him?" The lure of a business opportunity had not moved the boy at all, and what he had 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."