Galt laid his hand on the sunny curls, and drew the excited little horseman to him, gazing into the dreamy, fathomless eyes so accusingly like Dora's. “I think I'd better hold you both,” he said, in an attempt at playfulness. He had heard sordid business men who had children say that there was no love like that of a man for an eldest son. This was his eldest son, if not by the writs of man, by the mandates of something infinitely higher. “I wish I had a really-really horse,” Lionel ran on, plaintively. “Grover Weston has a pony, but mamma says he can have everything because his father is rich. I don't like him. He threw my ball back over the fence the other day and called me names. I don't know what he meant by them, but my mother said they were not nice, and told me not to remember them. I've already forgot what he said. It was bas--bast--How funny! I knew it once.” Galt's inner being seemed to shrink and wither. Already the world's persecution of the innocent had begun, and the sensitive, poetic, imaginative child would grow up to a full realization of his social shame. Nurtured in gentleness and refinement, he was yet to have the scales which hid his humiliation from from his sight, and then he would see; he would understand; he would know who to blame. And he _would_ blame, poignantly and justly. The time might come when this tender sprig of himself, grown strong, and yet galled by his burden, might face his father as the cowardly churl who had stamped the unbearable stigma upon him and her. This child might live to curse him and spit upon him. The world might forgive in the glow of his power and gold, but the one he yearned for now, as he had yearned for nothing before, would go over his infamous past as minutely as an ant over the bark of a rotten tree. The child had put down the weapon of his honored ancestor, and now stood with his little hands on the knee of his father, another side of his personality uppermost. “I don't care,” he said, in his charmingly premature way, “if Grover Weston _doesn't_ like me, because you say you do. He's nothing but a mean, horrid boy, while you are--” “I am what, Lionel?” Galt's voice was stayed by huskiness in his throat, and he put an unsteady arm round the little form, resisting the yearning to clasp him tightly. “Oh, you are everything--everything in the world. Doctor Wynn says you are very, very rich, and that you love all little boys--that's why I jumped that day. I wouldn't be afraid to jump from a higher tree than that if you were there to catch me. Oh, I like to have people love me! I like it better than anything.” “And yet you _do_ want other things?” Galt said, tentatively. “Oh yes.” The child, guided by the gentle pressure round him, slid between his father's knees, and, putting his arm confidingly about Galt's neck, he drew himself to a seat in the man's lap, and laughed. “Mamma says I want the whole earth. I want a bicycle; and a gun; and a pony; and roller-skates; and--”