denly with tears. "You did that!" she breathed. "You went away so that I wouldn't know! And afterward you refused to tell about yourself because of that! And you so little and so friendless and without a home! Oh, my dear, my dear! But that isn't what I meant. When you said to me that you didn't know your parents, wasn't it a little—just a little bit because you didn't believe the woman when she said she was your mother?"
He reflected. It was not easy, now that he knew Helen Lampert was not his mother, to recall what he had felt about her before. It seemed to him that he had thought her "nuts," not because she said she was his mother, but because of the wildness of her manner and the incoherence of her speech.
"No'm," he told her.
"You believed what she told you?"
"Yes'm."
"You didn't have any memories at all which made you think that perhaps you ought not to believe her?"
He could not understand this.
