“Well, I had a terrible fight with Grover Weston over in Mr. Galt's yard. Grover said a nasty, mean thing about her. You told me not to let her know anything like that, and so did Mr. Galt, but mamma is begging me so hard.” “Oh!” The old woman lifted the boy over her into the bed, and put her arms about him tenderly. “You can tell Granny about it, and then if she thinks best perhaps you may tell your mother.” He complied, and the wondering old woman, as she lay with the child in her arms, heard the whole beautiful story in every detail, even to Galt's display of affection, and as she listened cold tears welled up in her old eyes and trickled down the furrows of her cheeks to her pillow. When it was over, she led the child back to his mother. “Don't ask him any more about it. Wait,” she said, in an undertone, and with a significant gesture in the direction of her room. “Don't spoil a beautiful thing. God bless him! he is right--young as he is, he is right! The very angels of heaven are closing his sweet lips to-night. Don't bother him.” When Lionel was asleep Dora anxiously crept into her mother's room. A lamp was now burning on a table, but Dora blew it out, and went and sat on the edge of her mother's bed. “I know your secret now,” Mrs. Barry faltered, with a suppressed sob in her pillow. “All these years I have wondered over your great trouble, and why you were not more open with me about it, but Lionel has made it clear. I understand now.” “Did Kenneth Galt tell my child that--” Dora cried out, in a rasping undertone. “Did he dare to--” “No, no, not that!” the old woman corrected. “He simply betrayed himself in his conduct toward the boy. Listen! Lionel need never suspect that you know what he did, but you must be told the truth. It is too beautiful for you to miss.” She told the whole story as it had come from the child's lips, together with other things she had culled as to happenings between him and his father on former occasions. “Let them both alone,” she added, fervently, as she concluded. “The little fellow, nameless and cast out as he is, has of himself won the love God gave him the right to. It is his. Let him keep it, and I pray Heaven that it may drag that haughty spirit down into the mire of repentance. I've thought it all over. I remember the date well. I know now why he deserted you; he couldn't face public exposure just at that particular time. His temptation was great, and he fell. I believe he loved you _then_, and that he does _yet_.” “_Does yet!_” Dora sneered, and she put a protesting hand out to her mother's as it lay on the coverlet. “Don't say that. He couldn't now--after all this time.”