“But she is alive, in the world, _like that_?” said the boy; and drew a long painful breath. Lady Eskside could not tell, and dared not ask, how much Val understood or remembered of his mother and her life when he said these words; and indeed, I think the boy himself would have found it very difficult to tell. He had lost all clear recollection of her in those seven years past, which were just the years in which a child forgets most easily--or remembers most tenaciously, when its recollections are encouraged and cultivated. He recollected dimly his coming to Eskside, and more dimly a life beyond, which was not as his present life,--a curious dull chaos of wanderings and change, with a woman in it and a playfellow, for whom he used to cry of nights. The chief impression on his mind, however, was of the strange difference between that life and his present one. He had escaped out of that into this; and the thought of being made to go back again gave him a sensation of vague alarm. If this woman was his mother, might she not meet him somewhere, claim him, take him back again? This thought filled him with a confused and indescribable horror. He had experienced this strange feeling before now; when he saw caravans passing--when he met a wandering party of tramps on the road--it had occurred to him more than once, what if some one should claim him? though he scarcely knew the ground of his own fears. This had given a curious inarticulate duality to his life. There were two of him. One Valentine Ross, whom he could identify boldly, who was happy and free and beloved--the other, something he did not know. But after his conversation with his grandmother, this vague terror suddenly took shape and form. His mother, his _real_ mother, who had a right to him, might claim him, might seize upon him and carry him away. The idea filled him for the moment with mortal terror. He lost the security of childhood, and for the time felt himself involved in that insecurity, that panic, which is more terrible to a child than it ever can be in more mature life. A spasm came into his throat--a pang of shame and outraged feeling--which added to the terror, and made it very hard to bear. His eyes grew wet with a hot-springing moisture, salt and bitter, which seemed to scorch his eyelids. Lady Eskside, partially discovering the agitation in the boy’s mind, pressed him closer to her in sympathy and tenderness; but he set his elbows square, and repulsed the fond consoling movement. He was angry with her, and with all the world, because he himself was thus separated from all the world, though he was no more than a child. “I am going out,” he said abruptly, with a slight struggle to be free, “to say good-bye to Hunter and the rest. I promised to say good-bye to them. Let me go, grandma; I shall not be long away.”