"That was before we knowed all about how she had put him through college, and that this was his first visit home, and the first time he'd ever seen her--his own mother! I heard as how he'd thought all his life he was a orphan, and someone on the inside that very week--just when he'd finished in college--had wrote him that he wasn't no orphan, but had a mother living right here! So here he comes, hot foot--and didn't he spill the beans! "She'd tried her durnedest to keep it all covered up--and you must say she'd made one big fight of it, fer it's hard fer a woman to keep her eyes and her hands off of her own flesh and blood, even if it ain't legal. But, somehow, it's hard to keep that sort of thing covered up, for a woman. It all comes out, time'n again--ain't it the truth? How she done it for twenty years is a miracle. But law! What's twenty years, come to forgettin' things like what she done?" CHAPTER II AURORA LANE While the doughty town marshal, endowed now with a courage long foreign to his nature, was leading away his sobbing prisoner, followed by the prisoner's dazed yet angered parent, these other two, mother and son, continued rapidly on their way toward the home of Aurora Lane. The young man walked in silence, his enthusiasm stilled, although he held his mother's hand tight and close as it lay upon his arm. His face, frowning and stern, seemed suddenly grown strangely older. They arrived at the corner of the tawny grassplot of the courthouse yard, crossed the street once more, and turned in at the long shady lane of maples which made off from that corner of the square. Here, just in the neutral strip between business and residence property, opposite a wagon-making and blacksmith shop, and adjoining the humble abode of a day-laborer, they came to a little gate which swung upon a decrepit hinge. It made in upon a strip of narrow brick walk, swept scrupulously clean, lined with well-kept tulips; a walk which in turn arrived at the foot of a short and narrow stair leading up to the porch of the green-shuttered house itself. It was a small place of some half-dozen rooms, and it served now, as it had for these twenty years, as home and workshop alike for its tenant. Aurora Lane had lived here so long that most folk thought she owned the place. As a matter of fact, she owned only a vast sheaf of receipted bills for rent paid to Nels Jorgens, the wagon-maker across the street. In all these twenty years her rent had been paid promptly, as were all her other bills.