"I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, 'Mother Jess.' Your--aunt, is she?" "Oh, no," said Bruce, simply. "I've no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,--Am I boring you?" "No, indeed!" Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation. He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. "Our own mother died there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn't seem to have any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow; Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn't told any one in the hotel where she was going. Registered from Boston, but nobody could be found in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in. She hadn't enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died; he'd just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess. Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we'd be better off on the farm than in a Home and she needed us--bless her! Do you wonder Pete and I swear by the Camerons?" "No," said Elliott. "Indeed I don't." She had what she had been angling for, in good measure, but she rather wished she hadn't got it, after all. "Haven't you had any clue in all these years as to who your people were?" "Not the slightest. I'm willing to let things rest as they are." "Yes, of course," thought Elliott, "but--" She let it go at "but." Oughtn't somebody, as Stannard said, to have warned her? These boys' people might have been very common persons, not at all like Camerons. The fact that no relatives appeared proved that, didn't it? Every one who was any one at all had a family. Bruce did not look common: his gray eyes and his broad forehead and his keen, thin face were almost distinguished, and his manners were above criticism. But one never could tell. And hadn't he been brought up by Camerons? The very openness with which he had told his story had something fine about it. He, like Laura, seemed to see nothing in it to conceal. Well, was there? Elliott could quite clearly imagine what Aunt Margaret, Stannard's mother, would say to that question. She had never especially cared for Aunt Margaret. As Elliott looked at Bruce Fearing, one of the pillars of her familiar world began to totter. Actually, she could think of no particularly good reason why, when she had heard his story, she should proceed to shun him. His history simply didn't seem to matter, except to make her sorry for him; and yet she couldn't be really sorry for a boy who had been brought up by Aunt Jessica.