“I explained to him that it was mostly due to the pride of his mother, and to the natural fear that such an intelligent boy, and one so sensitive and observant as he is, might learn of his misfortune and suffer from it. That conversation raised Kenneth Galt in my estimation, Uncle Tom. I know now that he has true feeling and sympathy for the unfortunate, and that his ambition is not all there is to him.” “I must confess that the child has greatly interested me,” the General said. “From my window I can see him playing in that narrow yard, always dressed neatly, and as strong and straight as an Indian in his bearing. I have never seen him outside the fence. I have stopped to speak to him once or twice in passing, and have been actually charmed by his face and manner. I don't think I ever heard of a case exactly like his. Of course, there have been thousands of children born like that in straitlaced communities, but I never heard of one being brought up in that prison-like way. It surely is wrong, and it will make the truth all the harder to bear when it does come out, as it must sooner or later. She is a wonderful woman--I started to say girl, for she seems almost like a child to me with that sad, young face, and wistful, artistic beauty. I have met her mother on the street a few times, her old face thickly veiled, but I have not seen Dora or the child away from the cottage.” “As their family doctor,” said Dearing, “I urged Dora to go out herself for exercise and to take the boy with her. At first she flatly refused. I frightened her, however, by saying that the constant confinement would injure Lionel's health. Since then she has taken him with her in fine weather when she goes sketching in the woods and swamp back of the cottage, but she is as shy as a fawn about it. I venture to say that no one has ever met her on those excursions. I've seen mother-love, Uncle Tom, in all its phases. I've met it at the death-beds of scores of children, but the love between that unfortunate mother and child is the prettiest thing on earth. No pair of lovers were ever more constant and affectionate. Lionel is really a sort of psychological oddity in his way. I have a theory that the mother's morbid suffering was in some prenatal way stamped on her offspring.' He is queerly supersensitive for one so young, and seems constantly afraid that he won't be liked. He is rather fond of me--perhaps it is because I'm the only visitor at the house; and when I take him in my lap to hold him, I can see that he enjoys it as if it were an unusual luxury. He closes his eyes sometimes and smiles, and says he wants to go to sleep that way. Then he will ask me over and over again if I love _him_. After being told that I do, he will detect some slight change in my face or voice and cry out, 'Now, you don't like me--do you?' I am not sentimental, Uncle Tom, but that little chap's condition has worried me a lot. I pity him as I've never pitied a human being before.”