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<div style="border:1px solid black; display:table; margin:auto; padding:5px; text-align:center;">
<div style="border:1px solid black; display:table; margin:auto; padding-left:2em; padding-right:2em; text-align:center;">
{{xxxx-larger|{{uc|Peewee}}}}<br />
{{lg|''By''}}<br />
{{xxx-larger|[[Author:William MacHarg|William MacHarg]]}}<br />
''Co-Author of''
{{x-larger block|"[[The Indian Drum]],"<br />"[[The Blind Man's Eyes|Blind {{SIC|Men's|Man's}} Eyes]],"<br />etc.}}
{{dhr|5}}
[[File:Reilly & Britton Co. logo (1917).png|150px|center]]
{{dhr|5}}
{{larger block|Chicago<br />
The Reilly & Lee Co.<br />
1922}}
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{{c|{{sb|
Copyright 1921<br />
by<br />
The Reilly & Lee Co.
{{rule|3em}}
All Rights Reserved
{{rule|3em}}
Made in U. S. A.
{{dhr|10}}
''Peewee''
}}}}

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{{c|{{larger|{{uc|Contents}}}}}}
{{TOC begin}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|{{asc|Chapter}}||{{asc|Page}}}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|1|[[Peewee/Chapter 1|The Puzzle of the Shadows]]|9}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|2|[[Peewee/Chapter 2|Shaking a Family Tree]]|31}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|3|[[Peewee/Chapter 3|"I Can't Hurt Her Like That"]]|49}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|4|[[Peewee/Chapter 4|Peewee Cannot Stay Away]]|65}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|5|[[Peewee/Chapter 5|A Different Sort of Kiss]]|77}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|6|[[Peewee/Chapter 6|An Undesirable Grandfather]]|89}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|7|[[Peewee/Chapter 7|A Vista of Fortune]]|102}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|8|[[Peewee/Chapter 8|The Man of the Big House]]|119}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|9|[[Peewee/Chapter 9|Youth and Age Match Wits]]|135}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|10|[[Peewee/Chapter 10|A Difficult Surrender]]|153}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|11|[[Peewee/Chapter 11|The Country of Calamity]]|166}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|12|[[Peewee/Chapter 12|Coming to a Show-Down]]|182}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|13|[[Peewee/Chapter 13|Back to the Big House]]|199}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|14|[[Peewee/Chapter 14|She Never Had a Child]]|215}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|15|[[Peewee/Chapter 15|The Lonesomeness of Crowds]]|229}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|16|[[Peewee/Chapter 16|Who Is Mrs. Cord?]]|244}}
{{TOC row 1-1-1|17|[[Peewee/Chapter 17|In His Mother's Arms]]|256}}
{{TOC end}}

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Peewee, as he preferred to call himself—H. Seabury, as he was known to certain municipal and county authorities who would have confined him in some home for dependent children if they had known where he was—was advancing nervously in West Madison Street, Chicago. He looked at intervals apprehensively over his shoulder at a man following some thirty feet behind him, noting that the man timed his steps with his own. When Peewee hastened, the man hastened; when Peewee slowed, he slowed; when Peewee stood still, the man stood still. The boy's tentative conclusion from this was that the man was an agent of the Juvenile Court./begin/

From his earliest memory—when he had been one of innumerable little figures, all under three

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feet in height, clothed in washable garments of white and blue, who marched to meals under discipline of women who wore wide white starched hats—agents of the Juvenile Court had been the only persons who concerned themselves actively about Peewee. Who his father and mother had been he did not know. For business reasons, when asked his age, he answered ten; he was, as established by court records, probably not more than eight, and even for that age he was surprisingly small. The name Peewee, which he much preferred, had been given him by his associates in the orphanage because of this diminutive size; his other name, which he had carried officially since the age of three, had been manufactured in court for him, in order that he might have a name, his own not being known. He had run away from the asylum at the age of six. He had run away, within another year, from a "Boys' Home." His life since then had been a succession of confinements in various charitable institutions and of astute escapes. The means by which he provided for his existence, when the county or charity were

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not providing for it, was by selling newspapers.

Peewee sold his newspapers between four o'clock in the afternoon and seven—the hours during which children are not subject to interference by the authorities on the downtown streets. He could not sell them on the corners, which are places of proprietorial right and themselves are bought and sold; so he sold them in the middle of the block, where no supervision is exercised. His trade was mostly feminine. Whatever the boy's ancestry had been, he had a face which sent a pang to every childless woman's heart—a distinctive, unforgetable face, large violet eyes shaded by long lashes of deepest widow's black and a mouth of childish innocence. Dirt, to which he paid no heed, and disfiguring garments which had descended to him from some larger boy, could not make him unattractive to women. "Girls" of thirty, working in offices and living in clubs, went three blocks out of their way to buy their papers of him at night, and other women, passing to or from their limousines—women with clear eyes and transparent skins, giving out scents of perfumes and of furs—ex-

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claimed over him and stopped and forced their escorts to give him money.

Peewee was inordinately wise for his age, though more wise in evil than in good, but he had never tried to find out the nature of his feelings towards these women. Something mostly pleasant, but partly painful, was stirred in him by them. He took pride in the methods he had acquired of attracting their attention. When, however, he had accomplished this, another feeling not capable of analysis succeeded; an internal warning told him that it might bring tears. He could not remember ever having cried; he shrank from tears and ridiculed them, as he did all soft things. He put his dirty hand surreptitiously against the women's furs and breathed deeply in their scents. When they had passed on, leaving the probability that he would never see them again, a momentary feeling of loss and loneliness came to him; then he turned his attention again to the street, where something interesting was always happening.

Two other things were characteristic of him: Places—this was the first one—were indiffer-

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ent to him. When he encountered unpleasant circumstances anywhere, he prevented their repetition by going away from that place and subsequently avoiding it. People in mass—this was the second characteristic—were intensely interesting to him. If two persons stopped to talk upon the sidewalk, he went close to them and listened; he was an expert on the multi-logue of crowds. He was fully conscious of his own insignificance and that people talked in his presence as though he were not there.

Peewee's independence made him a problem to the authorities. If the man now following him was an agent of the Juvenile Court, his latest long period of liberty, during which his expertness had made recapture seem almost improbable, was now about to terminate.

He was beginning to consider, however, that his follower did not act like any officer of a public sort. Such an officer, having suspected or identified Peewee, would have laid hands upon him at once. He would hardly have followed, as this man had done, for so many blocks that the boy long ago had lost count. At Desplaines

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Street, and again at Halsted Street, Peewee, with a cautious eye upon the man, had attempted to turn south. In each instance the man had hastened forward within arm's reach; then Peewee, in panic, had resumed his former course. That the man had fallen promptly back to the position he had held before gave grounds for an inference that he did not think it necessary to molest Peewee so long as they continued to go west.

Yet even panic could not drive Peewee much further out of the districts which he knew. He observed frequent half-open doors giving upon stairways which went upward in the buildings that they passed; other doors led down to basements. He reflected that in a neighborhood with which he was acquainted some of these would have offered opportunity for abrupt escape. There were no openings upon the street front except doors, for the alleys here ran east and west. To attain an alley he would have to turn either south or north. He had already twice tried south; at the next street intersection, he darted quickly north. But he had not gone twenty feet when he felt the man's clutch upon his wrist.

Previous experience now guided Peewee; he

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fell at once into a docile walk. He did not speak and the man did not speak. They walked on steadily a block more to Washington Boulevard, and there the man turned them west. As Peewee looked up, the man rewarded his docility by displaying a police badge. But this badge of the Burke and Mundy private detective agency only gave a new perplexity to the boy. The varieties of police were known to him. He could understand that a private detective might have preferred not to lead him through the streets so long as he himself was following the direction wished. But what could any private detective want of him? And where could he be taking him? There were no court rooms out this way.

Washington Boulevard, east of Union Park, is a district which the city, having once made, has now unmade. Great houses front the asphalt where the motors roll; but the original inhabitants no longer occupy these houses. The brick and limestone faces are defaced by paint; the iron railings of thirty-five years ago are disintegrating with rust. Delicatessens have crept into the basements; manufacturing has taken the first floors; the stables have become machine shops.

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On nearly every door furnished rooms are advertised for rent.

The house in front of which the man halted Peewee was detached—a limestone pile of former grandeur, surrounded by a small unkempt yard. The man seemed familiar with the place. He rang the bell decisively, and when, after an interval, it was answered by a slatternly old woman with gray hair falling over her eyes, he pushed her aside and led Peewee in. They ascended a musty smelling stair to an equally musty smelling, dusky hall. The door upon which the man knocked, after following this hall, was opened by a frivolous looking colored girl in high-heeled, expensive shoes. The man and the business he came upon appeared known to her, for she motioned them to come in without making any inquiry. She looked curiously at the boy. The man pushed Peewee ahead of him into a room of what had been once an ornate suite of double bedrooms, dressing room and bath. Only part of these rooms were visible; the door of the furthest room was closed. Curtains of imitation lace, gray with dust, cov-

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ered the windows of the room they were in, which seemed now used as a salon. The furniture was of the second-hand sort and had been maltreated. The yellowed keys of the small piano were charred by cigarette stubs.

The negro girl went away, teetering on her high heels, and could be heard knocking at one of the inner doors. Then a middle-aged trained nurse appeared. She too looked curiously at Peewee.

"This is the boy?" she asked.

"This is him," the man replied.

The nurse looked at Peewee. "You're the little boy that sells newspapers on Madison Street between Wells Street and La Salle?"

Peewee felt more at ease in the presence of the nurse. What it was that was happening to him, he could not divine, but it was at least nothing in the regular course of justice and charity. "Yes'm," he confirmed.

"I picked him up this evening," the man explained, "after he'd sold out his papers. He was headed this direction and I let him come and only laid hands upon him a few blocks back. The

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lady received the report I and the other operative made to the chief?"

"I believe so. Is there something you want to add to that?"

"No; that covers all that we found out."

"You understand that you are to leave him here."

"That was the instructions."

The man went out. When the door had closed upon him, Peewee felt more comfortable. He was less afraid of women than of men, and the sex of this middle-aged trained nurse gave him confidence in her. The look of curiosity on her face had become a more definitely centered interest.

"How far can you remember back, little boy?" she asked.

He merely stared up at her.

"You don't understand," she decided. "When you think back, as far back as you can to the time when you were very little, what is it that you think of?"

He put one foot upon the other—the instinctive expression of embarassment among those

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who stand upon wet pavements. His memory traveled backward to the Greenwood Boys' Home.

"Are you thinking back?"

"Yes'm."

"What is it you remember?"

"The boys."

The reply seemed unintelligible to her.

"Can't you remember anything before that?"

"Yes'm."

"What?"

He returned mentally to the orphan asylum.

"The Sisters."

She seemed again not to understand.

"Before that," she insisted. "Don't you remember anyone earlier still?"

"No'm."

"Not a single person?"

"No'm."

"Not—your mother?"

"No'm."

She took his hands, holding him in front of her.

"I'm going to take you in to see your

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mother," she said. "That's why you were brought here—to see her. You must be very careful. You must answer if she speaks to you, but you mustn't talk much. Do you understand?"

"Yes'm."

"Then wait here a minute."

She left him, and he looked after her with increasing interest. Was his mother here? What the nurse had said seemed to make that certain. The nurse could not be his mother; she had spoken of taking him to her. His mother could not be the old woman who had opened the street door. The operative had spoken of a lady. He hoped, if the lady was his mother, she would prove to be pretty. He recalled some of the women who had given him money, and hoped she might be one of those.

The nurse returned and led him to the closed door of the furthest room and opened it and pushed him in ahead of her. He blinked as he peered about with interest, for the room was partly darkened.

It was a large bedroom, with furniture which,

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like that in the other rooms, had passed through different hands. A multitude of frippery toilet articles, defaced by misuse, scattered the dresser among portraits of several different men in tinsel frames. There was a stand with medicines, a pallet for the nurse, a large bed. The room was filled with a heavy scent of perfume. As by degrees the objects in the room, which had appeared to him at first only as outlines, acquired distinctness, Peewee surveyed with disappointment the woman in the bed, who moved excitedly at sight of him. She was not now pretty, whatever she might once have been. Her blonde hair was drawn tightly back from a narrow forehead marked with fine blue veins; her full lips were cracked and puffed; her cheek bones seemed pushing through the tight drawn, hectic skin, and her eyes were startlingly wild and bright.

"She is very ill," the nurse whispered to him "Be careful."

"If you will go out!" the woman said to the nurse.

The nurse hesitated doubtfully.
{{nop}}

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"If you will go out!" the woman repeated.

The nurse went out and closed the door upon them.

"Come here." The woman stretched out to him her thin, blue-veined hands covered with rings.

He was not, he told himself firmly, afraid of her; there was therefore no name for the feeling aroused in him by the wildness of her manner. It was this feeling that forced him to obey her. She caught his hands with her burning hot ones and drew him to her.

"My baby!" she whispered, "My baby! I've got you back. You've been away from me so long."

He resisted as her hands crept upward on his arms and clutched him down against her breast.

"You must kiss me," she said. "You know—your mother. A pretty kiss for mother."

She turned his face between her hands, and pressed her fiery lips hard upon his. He could hear the nurse pacing up and down outside the door uneasily.
{{nop}}

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The woman's trembling fingers began to smooth his hair. "They've dressed you wrong," she said. "I don't like this suit. They should have put on your velvet suit and the Eton collar. We will tell them you must have that on, and we'll go riding in the park. Would you like to ride in the park with mother? Would you like to have a pony? My baby! My little Walter! You have been away so long. Now you will never go away again. You will stay with me always. Unless something happens. So much has happened."

Her words seemed to bring some thought to her; her gaze wandered uncertainly.

"If something happens—" she repeated.

Her grasp slackened, and he drew himself away, held only by one hand.

"I sent the nurse away. They don't know I'm so clever. Can you write, Walter?"

"Yes'm."

"Names? Can you write names?"

"I can write down the letters."

"Go over to the dresser. Open the top drawer. Do you find some cards there? Men's

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cards. Men's cards! Take any one of them. We only need the back of it. Have you got one?"

"Yes'm."

"Is there a pencil in the drawer?"

"Yes'm."

"Bring it here. Bring the card here with it. Rest it here on the bed. Write 'W'—big 'W'."

He wet the pencil tip against his tongue and did as she directed.

"Write 'a'—little 'a'. Write it close behind the other. Now 'l'. Now 't'."

He obeyed, laboriously forming the letters as she directed until they reached clear across the card.

"Can you read what it spells?"

He hesitated. "Markyn," he said, looking uncertainly at the last word.

"That is it. Now read the rest."

"I can't."

"No? That is easier than what you read."

"I'll spell it out."

"Put down your head and I'll whisper.

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'Walter Wendell Markyn' is what it spells. You can read it now, can't you? Can you?"

"Yes'm."

"Now write numbers. Write '1'. Write '6'."

He followed her directions until she had finished.

"Can you read it?"

"Yes."

"Do it."

He read the numbers and spelled out the words, "North State Street, Chicago."

"That is it. Put the pencil back in the drawer. Shut the drawer. Put the card in your pocket. Have you done it?"

"Yes."

"Bend over me. I want to whisper. That is your father. His name and his address. Do you understand? That is your father and where he lives."

"Yes'm."

"Don't show the card to people. Don't tell them. Nobody knows. We are the only ones who know. You and I, baby. If something

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happens—you ought to have his name. Now kiss mother—kiss mother pretty, my baby boy!"

He heard the nurse at the door. As the nurse came in, he straightened himself away from the fierce kisses. The nurse disengaged him from the clinging arms.

"He is not to be sent away. You are to keep him here," the woman directed anxiously.

"Of course; I understand that," the nurse assured her.

She led him back to the room where he had been first and went back to her patient.

Peewee sat in the increasing dusk, blinking dazedly about him. He considered first the name which the sick woman had called him—Walter. It must be, he comprehended, what persons would regard as his real name, since his mother had called him that. At the same time, boys did not necessarily bear the same first name as their fathers. He was not certain that he liked the name. He had refused formerly to recognize, except officially, the name which the court had given him. Had the sick woman, as

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his mother, authority to make him accept this name whether he wanted to or not?

The human relations were obscure to him. He had known since he could first remember that he must at some time have had a mother and a father; but exactly what a mother and a father ought to be was something that experience had left indefinite and confused for him. His first feeling toward the woman he just had seen had been simply fear of her. He was not capable of understanding the less clear feelings which he had toward her now. He resented her calling him "baby," but at the same time something seemed swelling in his throat and choking him. So far as he could remember no one before had ever kissed him, the passionate kisses of the sick woman, burning still upon his lips and cheeks, made him uncomfortable and unhappy, without his knowing why they made him so. No one, he realized, was watching him at present and he could have walked out the door and gone away. He decided he would do that, but he sat still and did not go.

The colored girl, dressed now to go out, came

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and switched on the light. She had a tray with food for him. While he ate, she prepared a bed for him upon the couch. She carried away the tray and passed through the room again on her way out a few minutes later.

"Turn off the light when you want to go to bed," she said.

He sat still, after she was gone. The nurse came and looked in upon him. Assured by his manner that he would remain where he was, she did not come again. He saw her come and go, out of and into the sick woman's room at intervals. She went in finally and did not come out again. He turned out the light and lay down upon the couch without taking off his clothes.

He awoke in broad day, and sat up and listened. The decision to go away was now definitely formed in him. He went on {{hinc|tiptoe}} to the door into the hall and opened it and looked out. There was no one in the hall and he could hear no one. Instead of stepping out, he, partly reclosed the door and went noiselessly to the closed door of the bedroom and listened. He

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stood there a long while, hearing nothing. If the nurse were in the room, he would have heard her move or have heard someone speak by now, he thought. He could not imagine where the nurse could be. Had she gone out? At any rate, the sick woman could not prevent his going away whenever he wished. He turned the knob of the door softly and looked in. The nurse was not in the room. The sick woman lay with eyes closed and without a pillow, her look of immobility sending a sudden tension through him and making the hairs prickle on his skin. He went quietly into the room and stood looking down at her. Should he speak to her and make her open her eyes? Or should he merely go away? Her hand with its many rings lay outside the coverlet, he put out his own hand hesitatingly and touched it, and at the contact the hairs again stood up upon his flesh in warning to him. The immobility of her look was corroborated by the stiffness of the hand, which was now cold instead of burning with fever as it had been the night before.

He drew back from her a little, staring.

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Death, as a fact, was known to Peewee; there had been no one to conspire to keep the knowledge of it from him. He recognized that his mother was dead, but it did not give him any particular feeling of unhappiness. It caused only a dryness in his throat and a sense of physical uneasiness. He backed slowly away, not ceasing to look at her. He felt behind him for the door, found it, and backed out through the opening. Then he reclosed the door. He listened again for the nurse. Not hearing her, he went out quickly into the musty hall, passed through it and down the stairs, opened the entrance door and ran out into the street.

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It was too early for truant officers to be inquisitive upon the streets, but habit dictated that Peewee should travel by the alleys. When he had assured himself that he had got away from the house without being followed or observed, he made for the alley south of it. The month was June; the morning was warm and cloudy. Traveling east along the alley, thoughtful and with his worn shoes splashing in the mud, he attempted to adjust his thought to what had happened. Was the woman who had died really his mother? If she was, what did that mean? The vagueness of his knowledge regarding fathers and mothers made it difficult to realize this.

His mother!

He recalled that, at the asylum, there had been a "mother superior" whom everybody feared. At the Boys' Home there had been

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"cottage mothers" who represented discipline over the boys. A father, in his first acquaintance with the term, had signified a grave man dressed in black who wore the symbol of the cross somewhere about his person. These early ideas of the meaning of the words "mother" and "father" had been supplemented later by recognition of a more intimate relation. But he had not seen anything particularly pleasant or desirable in the relation. He had seen indifferent mothers, oblivious of their children; virago mothers, who beat them; drunken mothers; mothers who regarded children as an asset and lived upon their earnings. His knowledge of fathers was that they, even more definitely still, represented unpleasant authority over children. In having neither he had felt a sense of freedom.

He took the card out of his pocket as he walked along, and spelled out and repeated the name which he had written on it—"Walter Wendell Markyn." The sick woman, he realized, had been "nuts" at the time when she had given him this name, and he did not deceive

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himself in his precocious wisdom, as to what sort of person she had been. These facts did not, however, controvert her evidence as to his father's name. Any assertion of authority over him which she might have represented had been obviated by her death. What, in this respect, did the card represent? The card excited in him a mild, impersonal curiosity. Having seen his mother, he was beginning to wonder, though without any immediate intention of investigating, what sort of person his father might be.

At Halsted Street, where the alleys changed to north and south, he turned south as far as Jackson. He halted and hesitated here. Until four o'clock he would not take the risk of entering the "loop," and he had intended to go south beyond its limits and then east to the lake, where probably he would find some boys in bathing. He turned back instead now on his steps as far as Monroe Street and traveled eastward to Canal. Long freight sheds here stretched along the street; men shouted, swore; the pavements roared under the wheels of scores of trucks.
{{nop}}

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Peewee could not remember back to the time when he had first noted among these trucks those which bore the name. "Markyn Transfer Company" and had spelled out the name upon them as he had the names upon other wagons.

It was this familiarity of the name which had made it easy for him to read when the woman had had him write it for her. There was not necessarily, he comprehended, a connection between the name upon the trucks and the name upon the card in his pocket. He sat down under the freight shed, looking at the trucks. It did not particularly incommode him that he had not breakfasted and might not lunch. Frequently he neglected these formalities. He could not have told, either, exactly what he was waiting for, though he watched continually the faces of the Markyn drivers. He had watched faces on the streets almost since boyhood, governing his acts accordingly. Toward noon, there arrived a truck with a fat, good-natured driver. The man swung himself from his seat, and went into the freight shed. Peewee arose at once and climbed up to the driver's seat. A half hour later, the truck

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having been unloaded and reloaded, the man ascended to the seat beside him.

"Where you going, kid?" he inquired, agressively.

"Nowhere."

The reply appeared satisfactory, for the man started the truck. They progressed for several blocks in silence.

"Who's Markyn?" Peewee inquired abruptly.

The driver turned and looked at him. "What's Markyn to you?"

Peewee's face maintained immobility. "Nothin'."

"What do you ask for?"

"Because the name is on the wagon."

The man reflected upon this connection. "Markyn's dead," he asserted.

Peewee considered. Would his mother have given him his father's name if that father had been dead? She might, if she were completely "nuts." If not, she would have known of the death, he thought. The statement seemed to establish that the Markyn whose name was on

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the trucks was not his father, but to let the assertion pass without contradiction would end the conversation.

"Like bunk he is!" he answered.

They advanced again in silence. The driver reached finally into the hip pocket of his trousers and extracted a worn billfold. He opened it and took out a worn slip of newspaper.

"Can you read?" he asked.

"Of course," Peewee said promptly.

"All right. You say the old man ain't dead; I say he is. Who's right?"

He gave the slip to the boy, who unfolded it and looked at it. The article was rather long; it had been defaced by carrying so that Peewee could not read the smaller printing, but the larger letters at the top were plain. He spelled them out: "Jeifrey Markyn, Second, one of the builders of Chicago, dies in Pasadena, California."

"I say, who's right?" the man insisted.

"You are," said Peewee.

"He was a good guy," the man asserted—"a good guy. He give me my first job. When

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the old man died I cut this out of the paper and kept it ever since."

Peewee gave the slip back to the man, and as soon as the truck stopped he got down and sat upon the curb to think. His conversation with the truck driver had not demonstrated any connection between the name upon the truck and name upon the card, but it had not, he recognized, proved that there was no connection. When the truck had proceeded along Desplaines Street, where he had left it, he got up and went east along Madison. He had spent the whole morning under the freight-shed; it was now early afternoon and he had decided, in his increasing interest, to take the chance of going into the "loop." Having crossed the river, he again took to the alleys, crossed Wells Street and sat down inside the alley mouth to wait.

The alley smelled of printer's ink; on the street front outside men were delivering bundles of newspapers to the waiting wagons. There were boys in the alley surreptitiously gambling for pennies and some unhappy looking men whom Peewee recognized as unemployed per-

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sons waiting to graft copies of the paper and look up "Help Wanted." A boy of fifteen came from a door opening on the alley, crossed to a lunchroom and returned, carrying something in a paper bag. Peewee had risen and was awaiting him.

"Hello," he offered.

The older boy was gracious. "Hello, kid," he vouchsafed.

Peewee squirmed ingratiatingly. "I know what it is you do," he asserted.

The other boy denied upon general principles. "You do not!"

"Oh, yes, I do; the wagonman told me. When someone dies you tell 'em what to print."

The older boy was flattered. "You said it, kid."

"I think you can't always find 'em."

The older boy betrayed corrupting associations. "The hell I can't!"

"I think you can't always," Peewee repeated.

The older boy grew angry. "Say, what are you talking about? I know my job. Say, you think I don't?"
{{nop}}

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"I can tell some that you can't find," Peewee insisted.

"You think you can? You come on; I'll show you!"

They ascended a narrow, dirty stair the smell of printer's ink growing stronger, to a small, dingy room filled with books, with bound files of newspapers, and, at one end, with filing cases and a table with a telephone. The older boy halted in front of the filing cases.

"This here is called the bone-yard," he announced. "Some call it the morgue. When someone dies, the local room calls me, and I give 'em the dope. You say I can't do it? You ask me about somebody. Shoot!"

Peewee pretended to reflect. "Find Markyn," he directed.

"Markyn? Say, that's easy."

The older boy selected one of the envelopes from a filing case and held it out. "There!" he exclaimed. "Say, ain't I right?"

"I'll see," Peewee answered.

He carried the envelope to the table, emptied it of its contents and began to look them over.

-40

The envelope had been completely filled with clippings from magazines and newspapers; some of these were pictures; he found it hard to learn anything where there was so much to be deciphered. The telephone rang and the other boy, answering it, received some instruction and set about fulfilling it.

Peewee bent over the clippings in absorption. "Jeffrey Markyn," he read, "came to Chicago from Connecticut in 1858. First of the name in this locality, he was a dealer in grains." He put this aside; he was not interested in Jeffrey Markyn, but in someone named Walter.

He picked up another. "The Markyn-Beman Wheat Corner." What did that mean? "In the late 80's, Markyn and his partner, Matthew Beman, made an attempt to corner the Chicago wheat market, which ended in temporary ruin for the Markyn family. This was the origin of the feud between them and the Bemans following which, Markyn and Beman never spoke again." What was feud?

"Associated with Beman, with whom he had put over a hundred business deals in the twenty

-41

years during which the men had been close friends, Markyn had secretly been buying wheat for months through a dozen brokers. The day upon the Board, when Markyn, believing the corner completed, attempted to close in, only to find that Beman, his supposed partner, had double crossed him and, while buying with one hand, had been secretly selling with the other, is historic and has been described by an eye-witness as follows."

Peewee let the clipping fall; there was no possibility of understanding stuff like that. He took up one of the pictures and spelled out the caption. "Idle Hour, the Southern California residence lately purchased by Jeffrey Markyn, Third." He tried another of the printed slips. "The formation of the transfer company in 1888, by which Jeffrey Markyn, Second, re-established the fortunes of the Markyn family—" There was no interest in this; what Peewee had read showed only that these particular Markyns were regarded as important people. It made it, in that way, less probable that he himself could have any connection with

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them. He had become incredulous of any such connection, but he breathed more quickly as he began to spell out the caption below the picture which had lain underneath this last printed slip:

"Mrs. Walter Wendell Markyn and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Cord."

Mrs. Walter Wendell Markyn? Who was she? His father's wife? Did the caption identify him with these important Markyns? There would not be two people by that name. He gazed intently at this picture of two ladies. She was very pretty, he thought—his father's wife, if it was his father. She would be the one upon the left. She was like the women who had given him money upon the streets, only she was more beautiful than any of those women. She seemed quite young. She was outdoors, carrying a parasol; her face was sweet and tender, her gaze frank and kind. His throat closed up, and he trembled with vaguely painful feelings. After looking at her a long while, he put the picture aside and turned to the next clipping. "Walter Wendell Markyn and Marion Beman are married. Society romance ends a feud orig-

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inating more than twenty years ago upon the Board of Trade." He looked at the date upon the clipping—"September 12, 1913"—and stopped to think.

The facts of birth were known to him, not uncertainly as to most children, but definitely; for he had heard them discussed without reserve. He did not know exactly when he had been born, but the ages of young children can be closely told, and he had learned during his appearances in court that, when he had been assigned to the orphan asylum, he must have been not over two. He had not been born, then, when this marriage had taken place. His father—was it his father?—had had a wife; a—what did the headlines call new wives?—a bride. What part in this, then, had been borne by the woman who had died on the West Side? It must be, surely, that she had been only "nuts." She could not be his mother; or else this Walter Wendell Markyn could not be his father.

The other boy, having finished his errand, had come back and was observing him.
{{nop}}

-44

"Well? Can't I find 'em?"

"Sure."

Peewee backed guardedly away and, when he had attained a safe distance, turned and went out. As he came out into the alley, he found the pavements wet with falling rain. He went around in front, got his papers from the wagonman and, opening one paper out, put it about the others to protect them from the wet. He did not consider whether he minded being wet himself; to be wet, if it rained in business hours, was customary. His too large clothing became sticky with the rain and clung to him, his shoes became pulpy, the visor of his cap softened and hung down in front of his eyes. In the late afternoon, he suddenly took the damp card from his pocket, wrapped it in several thicknesses of newspaper so that the pencil marks might not become obliterated, and put it back. Toward seven in the evening when he had disposed of his papers, he disregarded his usual direction of departure, which was toward the West Side, and began moving slowly north.

Not having decided what he meant to do with

-45

reference to the man who might be his father, he progressed as a stray dog goes, with frequent side excursions to examine objects which excited his curiosity, and with many halts. He sat for a time in the shelter of a warehouse beside the river, watching a pile driver being laid up for the night. At dark, he bargained at the rear door of a Greek lunchroom for a piece of pork between two slices of unbuttered bread and sat down in the alley to eat it. He observed with impersonal interest by the light through the lunchroom door that his hands, which had grown cleaner through handling the wet newspapers, had grown cleaner still through handling the bread. After dining he again moved north.

At ten o'clock, following many side excursions and pauses for inspection of {{hinc|area-ways}} and yards, he reached Division Street and North State. Until now there had been street cars running in the street, and the buildings had been stores over which people lived, or apartment buildings of somber, dingy brick. At this point the car tracks curved aside and the buildings were dwellings which increased in size and

-46

fineness with each succeeding. block. He must be drawing near the place. The numbers upon the house fronts were approximating that upon his card and a short way ahead of him the street appeared to end, its globed street lamps, which glittered hazily in the rain and were reflected on the wet pavement, circling into the curved drives of Lincoln Park. His heart beat more quickly, as he finally identified the house he sought and sat down across from it to inspect it at his ease.

It stood upon a corner—an immense square structure of Roman brick and sandstone, surrounded by a twelve foot wrought iron fence. He had expected, after what he had learned at the newspaper office, that it would be a fine house, but this expectation was not definite. Now, seeing its great shape and its shining windows, he grew excited. Personal experience had shown him more boys who did not live with their fathers than who did, but he knew that his experience was contrary to the general fact. Suppose he went to this Walter Wendell Markyn and, on looking at him, found him to be

-47

a kind-appearing man. Suppose, he showed him the card and said to him, "She says I am your son." Wouldn't he then live in that house, have plenty to eat, wear good clothes, and ride in motor cars? They might even let him drive the motor.

The windows of a number of rooms were lighted and the shades were up, but he could see no one in the rooms. At the rear of the house there was a gate on the iron fence and beyond that a paved court and other windows with lights. While he looked, one of these lights winked out and a man crossed the court and entered the house at a basement door.

The circumstance interested Peewee by its demonstration that this door was not locked. He went and tried the gate and found that he could get in. He crossed the court and pushed gently at the door. It opened, showing a dimly lighted, vacant hall. He went in and let the door close noiselessly behind him. Voices and laughter came to him from a room at the further end of the hall, and he moved cautiously forward until he could look in. There were several

-48

people in the room—young women in neat black clothes with little squares of lace upon their heads and men in liveries such as he had often admired when he saw them get down and open the limousine doors.

At his right a dark stair curved sharply up. He hesitated. No one, it appeared, had heard him come in; he could hear no one speaking or moving on the floor above. He looked again at the curving stair, and moved toward it, and still keeping his eyes upon the lighted door, he began to go upward step by step.

-49

Peewee, his soaked shoes making no sound upon the polished stair-treads, ascended into a large, softly lighted hall above. Rooms, some dark, some softly lighted like the hall, opened on both sides. He listened; there was, so far as he could determine, no one in these rooms; the only sounds that came to him were the voices and laughter from below.

The phenomenon of rooms lighted but not occupied perplexed him and reassured him at the same time; he advanced to look in upon the room nearest on the left. The lamps shining through silk shades showed it, as he had felt sure it must be, unoccupied. He went in excitedly and moved about, touching and looking at the ornaments and trying and feeling of the furniture. He stopped and touched curiously the long nap of the silky rug. There was another lighted room

-50

upon the other side, and he started toward it across the hall, but halted suddenly to inspect the sweep of the handsome, wide stairs. He went up hesitatingly, step by step, and at the top he listened. The silence assured him that there was no one on this floor either. He crossed to the nearest lighted bedroom; and this room—done in white and gold, with connecting dressing room and bath—set him to dancing deliriously. He patted the lace counterpane upon the bed with his damp and dirty hands, and picked up and examined the white toilet articles, monogrammed in gold, upon the dresser. He went to look in on the white and gilt of the tiled bath. But he caught himself about, checked and startled and stiffened by the sound of a motor which had stopped outside the house.

He ran out to the head of the stairs in panic. Unquestionably someone was coming into the house, and someone was also ascending the stairway from the basement, up which he himself had come. He realized that he must not be discovered here in the house, among all these beautiful and costly things. To have come to the.

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house openly and inquired whether the man there was his father would have been a different thing, but suppose, under these present circumstances, the man should prove not to be his father. Then they would merely turn him over to the police, who, he knew, did not allow poorly dressed people to make any explanations.

The person he had heard ascending the stair—a servant—passed through the lower hall. An outer door closed somewhere. He heard a man's deep, good-natured voice say something unintelligible; then he heard a woman's voice.

"It's possible," the woman's voice said, "to get him out to dinner, but anything that keeps him out after eleven o'clock is taboo apparently. Did you notice how he acted to-night?"

The man's voice answered: "Only like a man thinking of business, it seemed to me."

Then another man's voice, not so deep or pleasant, spoke: "One of my rights as a married man, my dear."

The woman laughed and Peewee drew back from the {{hinc|stair-head}} in terror. She had laughed from the bottom of the stair; she was coming

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up! He stared about in his fright for a place of concealment, then darted noiselessly into the nearest dark bedroom. He could see her plainly as she came slowly up the stair and stopped for several moments in the hall, hesitating and looking back as though something which she had not understood but only had felt vaguely was troubling her. She was the woman whose picture he had seen in the newspaper office. His father's wife?

She was a slender woman. Her hair was almost black, with lights of brown in it, and looped itself prettily about her ears and temples; her eyes were deep dark blue, and kind and pleasant; her nose and chin were finely formed and full of character; her mouth was sweet and tender. Her look was girlish, but her face showed more understanding and sympathy than mere girls have.

That indeterminate, disturbing emotion which he had felt in looking at her picture he felt still more plainly now. She made him, in some not understandable way, seem small and lonely; she stirred in him something like a physical want,

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like pain. He wished his dead mother might have looked like her. He was glad—because there was the suggestion of tears in his feelings—when she went into the white bedroom and closed the door. Then he rushed out silently toward the stairs.

He was planning his escape as he cautiously descended them peering down and looking for the men. The servants on the lower floor, he realized, had been disturbed; it was not probable that he could get out of the house by the way he had come in without being seen and caught. The alternative that remained was to get out at the great front door.

He could see nothing of the men. The door of one of the rooms which had been open when he had ascended the stairs was now closed. The men unquestionably had gone in there. He passed this door on {{hinc|tip-toe}} and had nearly reached the comparative safety of the vestibule when the voice of the deeper toned of the two men, reaching him through the closed door, caught and halted him and whirled him suddenly about:
{{nop}}

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"I'm not accusing you, Walter; I'm here to get an explanation from you."

It was not the sentence that had caught Peewee; it was the name. Was the other man in the room the one who might be his father? He hesitated. While he did so the room next to the one the men were in which had been dimly lighted became suddenly dark and he could no longer hear the men's voices. This phenomenon must have been produced by one of the men closing a door between the rooms. He crept into the dark room cautiously, and discovered that folding doors between the two rooms had been closed, but that by crouching close to the doors he could hear almost plainly. It was now again the deeper-voiced man who was speaking.

"Just this. Lampert, the old barn boss whom we discharged some years ago, came to me to-day. His daughter, he said, had died in some rooming house on the West Side. He rambled mysteriously and insultingly, about our family being the ones who ought to bury her. I didn't believe his story; I thought it was only a touch for money, but I couldn't let his insinuations pass.

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I went out there with him. He'd told this much truth at least; the woman lay there dead. It was easy to see what kind of woman she had been."

Peewee's pulse-beat had quickened. It must be the woman who had told him she was his mother that the man was talking about.

The other man said something not audible; then the first man spoke again.

"No, he'd come to me because I was the head of the family and the company, but his insinuations referred to you."

"You think they're true?"

"I'm asking you, brother."

"My God, Jeffrey! I'd be crazy to try to defend myself against you, when I need your help!"

Peewee caught eagerly at the name. That deeper-voiced man—he knew who he must be. That one whose death notice the truck driver had shown him had been Jeffrey Markyn, Second. This one, in the queer way this family called itself, must be Jeffrey Markyn, Third. He was at least, so he had just said—this Wal-

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ter's brother. In that case Walter's name would be also Markyn. Was the middle part of that name Wendell?

The first man said something now which Peewee could not hear.

The other answered: "Good heavens, Jeffrey! You don't suppose I risked my home for her?"

Again the first man said something inaudible.

"No, years ago. Before I married Marion. After they'd taken Marion abroad to marry her to someone over there."

Peewee stiffened. Marion? That was Mrs. Walter Wendell Markyn, the pretty lady who had just gone upstairs. This man was Walter Wendell Markyn, then.

"No, I'm not trying to excuse myself. If I were, I'd blame it on that damned old family enmity which, when Marion and I engaged ourselves to marry, made both families refuse to recognize our engagement."

What was an enmity? Peewee asked himself. Why did people use words one couldn't understand.
{{nop}}

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"They drove us both three-quarters mad, I think, before they took Marion away to separate us. Then, afterward, I met this barn boss' daughter. I don't know now how I came to drift into such an affair. I thought they'd succeed in getting Marion married to someone over there. She wrote me how hard they were trying to do that. They'd kept her over there so long I thought my love for her had weakened."

Peewee could not hear Jeffrey Markyn's reply to that; the other's words were clear.

"Of course not! This Helen Lampert knew that I would never marry her; she'd understood that from the beginning, and that it must end whenever I decided. But I furnished an apartment for her."

Jeffrey Markyn spoke again; the inflection of his voice showed he had asked a question.

His brother answered. "About two years. Then Marion came back."

It appeared to Peewee that this conversation was not getting easier to understand but harder. What had been "about two years?"

"I admit that, Jeffrey. You don't yet know

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half! This is much worse than you can think for Marion. When they took Marion away, we'd renewed our engagement as solemnly as we could; we'd sworn to one another by every sacred thing—Marion, that as long as she might live would never have any other man but me, and I, that I would never have any other woman. She came back and I found I still was crazy over her."

Peewee could understand that; he too was somewhat crazy over Mrs. Walter Wendell Markyn.

"She'd done so much, Jeffrey—she'd fought them for me, and beaten them, and now she'd come back here to marry me. She asked me if I'd kept our promise. I couldn't tell her 'No.' I was wild about her. I told her 'Yes.' I told Helen we were through, and she was game and square and didn't question it. I never heard from her again till day before yesterday."

"Then what?"

"She sent a note."

The circumstance interested Peewee inconsequentially. The sick woman had been able to

-59

write, then; she had not been strong enough when he had seen her. Had she written it on one of the "men's cards" and with the pencil out of the dresser drawer?

"Yes; she wanted me to come over to that place on the West Side. I didn't dare not to go. Ten years of silence and then—that! I knew it must be important. I went over there. I found her ill; she knew she was dying. Jeffrey, I said you didn't yet know half of it! There is a boy."

"What?"

"There's a boy."

Peewee jerked excitedly. He had been growing certain that the sick woman had told the truth; she was his mother and this Walter Wendell Markyn was his father. But he had not been so assured that his father knew. Much of what had been said had not been understandable to him, but this was. He realized that his father was still speaking.

"She'd understood me, she said, Jeffrey, all through our association better than I had understood myself. She'd known that I had never

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stopped loving Marion. She'd foreseen, when she learned Marion was coming back, that she would have to give me up, and she hadn't been willing to give me up entirely. She wanted the boy for herself. She meant to go straight for his sake. She didn't succeed in doing that. The courts, she said, took the child away from her when he was a little over two years old. Afterward she lost trace of him. There was some confusion of the records and the boy's identity was lost. Ten days ago, at the beginning of her illness, she saw him on the street and recognized him."

"Recognized him? A child of eight whom she had not seen since he was two?"

"The child's likeness to me attracted her attention and she had investigations made by private police who established his identity. She was to have the boy there for me to see. I didn't know what to do. I went back there and found her dead. The nurse who had attended her was there with her. The boy had been there but had got away. He must have slipped out, the nurse said, while she was telephoning the doctor.

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He can be found again; he sells newspapers on the street, and the private police whom she employed knew him. Jeffrey, what am I to do?"

His own course, Peewee argued, had now become quite clear. Did he, in fact, so greatly resemble his father? He wished there was some way he could look into the room and see. But he could not doubt the fact, since his mother had recognized him by that likeness; and he realized that, in that case, he did not need to be afraid. He would wait, he thought, until they had finished talking; then he would go into the room. He dramatized, with the instinctive egotism of children, his own importance and their great surprise when he should make that entry.

"We must find the boy, brother." This was Jeffrey Markyn speaking.

"I mean, what am I to do about my wife? Marion's love for me is built upon her faith in me. She feels that ours has been a perfect love. To learn now that I came straight from another to her—"

"Walter, we can't leave a boy of our blood—of father's blood and mother's—to fight out his

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life alone upon the streets. Who knows of your connection with him?"

"No one, as yet. Helen played square with me until the end. I used a fictitious name when I went over there."

"We'll have the boy found and put him with someone who'll look after him and have him educated."

Peewee clenched his hands resentfully. He did not want to be put with someone; agents of justice and charity had been trying to do that to him all his life. What he wanted was to live here in this house; and now, more even than that, to live near and see the woman who had gone upstairs. He heard his father now:

"Put him with some one? Until when? My connection with him will finally be found out and Marion will feel that I have put deceit upon deceit. My own hope of pardon from her—if there is a hope—would be that, as soon as I knew there was a boy, I came to her; confessed; begged her to forgive me."

"Tell her, then."

"I can't hurt her like that, Jeffrey! I can't!

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Even if we leave myself out of consideration entirely, I can't inflict that agony upon her!"

Peewee had been backing away from the door. The emotions, if not all the words of what the men were saying, were quite plain to him. His feelings had been stirred by their talk about Mrs. Markyn. They should not, he was determined, hurt her. The exact nature of the hurt to be inflicted on her was not wholly clear, but he understood that it was through him that it was to come to her. Because his father had found him—or rather was about to find him—she was to suffer.

He resented the means of prevention which they proposed for this. They should not, he was resolved, put him with someone to be taken care of; that would be no better than the Boys' Home. He did not, he considered, have any need of a father. He had got on very well without one—better than he would with a parent who proposed to send Burke and Mundy private operatives to look for him. They did not know, of course, what expertness he had gained in avoiding such agents.
{{nop}}

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He had crossed the darkened room and the hall and had reached the vestibule. He could hardly hear from there the voices of the men. He looked back over his shoulder at the big, luxurious rooms. There were limitations, he commenced to comprehend, upon people who lived in a fine house like this; there must be many things which a boy who lived here would not be allowed to do. He muffled with his hand the clicking of the lock as he sprung open the front door. He closed it behind him almost without a sound and descended the wide stone steps.

A light in what he thought must be the white bedroom blinked out as he turned after a few steps to look back at the house. He stood for some time gazing at the darkened window. How pretty she was and how sweet! His throat closed up in thinking of her. He decided that when he had grown up he would purchase a larger house than this and have her come to see him. There was a not quite understandable consolation in this thought. It was still raining, and he began to wonder where he was going to sleep.

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Whenever he was tired or hungry—his only causes of low spirits—Peewee thought of Mrs. Markyn. The certainty which had been made plain to him that his existence was a misfortune to her had determined him never to go where she might see him. He did not want her to be unhappy. As to his father, the most definite feeling he had toward him was anger. He had not wanted any parents, and had even felt a superiority over other boys who had relatives who could forbid them to do the things they wanted. It was clear to him that his father threatened his liberty more actively than the agents of the Juvenile Court ever had done. His father had more personal interest in discovering him than any agents; and the least that this discovery possibly could mean was that Peewee

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would be put away where his existence could be concealed.

To be put where he could be concealed implied possibly an institution of some sort. It implied certainly a regulation of his life by others. Incidentally, but importantly, it implied being put to bed at a stated hour. He was conscious that it might imply much more unpleasant things than that. Peewee assured himself that he was not afraid of his father. He resented his existence, but he was confident of avoiding him by his wits.

In the late afternoon of the fourth day after his visit to the State Street house he stood in Wabash Avenue near Washington Street, observing with a speculative eye a flower stand conducted by an Italian. As the search which his father must have instituted for him would be for a newsboy, he had not dared to sell any newspapers. The omission had unpleasant consequences. He perceived that if he did not sell something he soon would not be able to eat.

The only business he knew of, besides the selling of newspapers, which could be engaged

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in by so young a person as himself, was the selling of flowers or chewing gum. These had not, he knew, the standing which his former business had; boys have sold newspapers for so long that grown men who sell them appear to be invading one of boys' established rights; but the selling of flowers and chewing gum is regarded as irregular. He knew, by observation, the method of the flower business but not the source from which the young merchants obtained their stocks.

He bargained, after reflection, with the Italian for a small handful of his most faded flowers, and went west to Clark Street. Here he turned north, inspecting through their doorways the interiors of the somewhat questionable cafes. If he saw a man and woman inside seated together at a table, he pulled off his disreputable cap and went in. With his apprehensive stare fixed on proprietor and waiters and ready at any move on their parts to run, he laid one of the flowers on the table in front of the woman. The price he asked for each flower was five cents. Sometimes the woman took the flower and her escort

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refused to pay him; sometimes the escort gave him more than he had asked. At ten o'clock at night he had only one flower left.

An inspection of the most brightly lighted of the nearby cafes revealed a young lady with abnormally red cheeks and remarkably black eyebrows and eye-lashes in conversation with a gentleman at a table not too far from the door. He went in and put the flower on the table in front of her.

"What a pretty boy!" she said.

She stretched out a plump and not clean hand toward him with a gesture which enveloped him in a breath of strong perfume, and he backed rapidly away.

"Five cents," he said.

"Catch him," she directed the man with her. "I want to kiss him."

As he continued to back anxiously toward the door, but still keeping a proprietorial gaze upon the flower, she fumbled in her pocket book and produced twenty-five cents.

"I'll give you this for the flower," she offered, "if you'll let me kiss you."
{{nop}}

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He considered, gazing at the coin. By degrees he guardedly approached and she kissed him upon his mouth with soft, damp lips. He seized the quarter and ran out into the street, and stood gazing back at the entrance, rubbing his lips and thinking about Mrs. Markyn.

The women he had known best had been matrons of institutions, generally kind but always official. He had appreciated fully Mrs. Markyn's difference from them, as he was appreciating now, in his sophistication, her difference from the woman who had just kissed him. How attractive Mrs. Markyn had seemed, when he had seen her come up the stairs! He could recall the sound of her voice and of her clear, sweet laughter.

He resented the kiss that had just been given him. He did not know why it had made him feel suddenly small and lonesome. He looked south in the direction he had been intending to go, but instead walked north and east to look, in the safety of the darkness, at his father's house.

The windows of the lower part of the house were lighted, but he neglected them to watch the dimmer square above them which marked

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the bedroom window. He stirred excitedly as, after a long wait, the light of this window suddenly brightened as someone turned on the electrics within. Mrs. Markyn came to the window, stood an instant looking out at the sky, and then pulled down the shade. He breathed deeply. Whatever it was within himself that had been tormenting him had been quieted. He no longer felt tired, and as he moved away he skipped from edge to edge of the sidewalk, and made spirited attacks on imaginary enemies lying in wait for him.

It would not do, he decided, to come near the house by daylight, but he could come here and perhaps obtain these glimpses of her in the dark.

He came on the next two nights, but did not see her. Was it because she had gone out somewhere before he got there? On the succeeding afternoon he walked out along the shore of the lake to be on hand as soon as it got dark. The children's bathing beach penned in the curve of the concrete esplanade along the lake beside the Lake Shore Drive was crowded with little figures. He moved on past them to the end

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of the street on which the house stood. He could not, from this distance, see the house. A limousine was standing opposite where the house must be. He could not see who it was that came out and got into it, and it rolled away. Presently he saw it reappear a few blocks to the north and stop where the drive came closest to the lake. Mrs. Markyn's slender figure descended from it; she crossed the bridle-path and strip of greensward to the esplanade and moved in his direction, looking at the children and the lake, while the motor awaited her upon the drive.

Peewee thought he ought to run away; then he reflected that to run would attract her attention. The best thing, he decided, was to sit still and not to look at her. But as she passed in front of him he was unable not to look. His great eyes, fixed eagerly upon her, caught her own. His heart thumped as he saw her smile at him, and he was terrified by the impression that she knew who he was. Then he realized that if she had known she would not have smiled. She smiled because she was happy. If she was happy it was because he was letting her be so. He

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did not consciously formulate this or what it made him feel to realize that she was happy, but he warmed pleasantly. She stopped a few moments near him to watch the children; then she walked across the grass to the motor, and got in and went away.

Did she walk here every day? He determined to investigate that. The next day she did not come, or the day following. On the third day the motor reappeared and she took the same short walk. She smiled again at seeing him, and he saw recognition in her of having seen him there before.

"Hullo," she said.

He did not make any reply but gazed at her intently.

In the two succeeding weeks he saw her, in all, six times. She grew accustomed to seeing him there, and twice she stopped and spoke some unimportant words to him. It was quite safe, he perceived, for him to see her like this; she did not make distinction between him and the other children that she saw, and had no suspicion that he was related to her.
{{nop}}

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Exactly how, he wondered, was he related to her?

When the motor had gone away, he went to Clark Street and caught a "hitch" through downtown to Adams Street and another west almost to Halsted. Here he dropped down and took the sidewalk. This progression brought him to a stairway descending to a basement entrance. Pendant beside the entrance was a string of shoes—none new; above the doorway was a sign, "Shoes for One-legged Men Our Specialty," and beside the entrance hung shoes, not in pairs, but one by one.

At the stairfoot a Greek a little larger than a dwarf was patching shoes upon a cobbler's bench. In the room visible through the door an immense woman moved slowly about and four small children were playing with bits of leather on the floor.

Peewee sat down upon the upper step.

"Papoulas," he inquired, eyeing the children, "how many people make a family?"

The question appeared not fully plain to the Greek.
{{nop}}

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"Everybody has a father and a mother," Peewee helped.

The Greek appeared now to understand.

"Also grandfathers—two grandfathers. One is his father's father, the other is his mother's. He has two grandmothers, too. The fathers of grandfathers are called great-grandfathers. It is the same with grandmothers."

He finished the patch he was making; then he recommenced.

"The brothers of his father are his uncles. So are his mother's brothers. Their sisters are his aunts. The children of his uncles and his aunts are his cousins."

Peewee adjusted his knowledge in accordance with these facts. He had been indefinitely aware of these relationships, but had wanted what he knew made definite. Jeffrey Markyn, Third, these things established, was his uncle. Jeffrey, Second had been his grandfather.

Some words of the obituary shown him by the truck driver had lingered in his head. "Jeffrey Markyn, Second," it had said,—"One of the builders of Chicago." He had been inter-

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ested in this because it had not previously occurred to him that the city had been built. It grew, he had observed, by buildings being added, and it improved by old buildings being torn down and new ones being erected in their place. But accepting it as it was, he had neglected to speculate as to the time when there had been no city here at all.

He looked up with new interest at the surrounding buildings. Had Jeffrey, Second, he wondered, built any ones among these? Had he built them with his own hands, or simply "bossed" their building? How did one go about it to build a {{SIC|city." He|city? He}} began to feel a certain pride in his grandfather, the city-builder, and a desire to emulate him, considering whether, after he had grown up, he would not select an eligible site and construct a city for himself.

The original Jeffrey Markyn—he who had been concerned in the Markyn-Beman "wheat corner," whatever that might have been—had been his great-grandfather. These facts did not touch, however, the question which he had at heart.
{{nop}}

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"What," he inquired of Papoulas, "is a person to his father's wife?"

"When she is not his mother?"

"Yes."

"She is then his step-mother," the Greek replied. But he continued to reflect. It was not always the case, in the circles in which he moved, that she was a step-mother. "That is, if his father and mother were married," he added. "If they were not, he is not any relation to her at all."

"Not anything?"

"Not anything."

Peewee got up and moved away disconsolately. His resentment against his father increased. Exactly what marriage had to do with it was not perfectly plain, but his father had stated definitely that he had not married Peewee's mother. Consequently his father had related Peewee to a number of persons who were perhaps somewhat interesting in their way; but by his neglect had left him unrelated to the one person whose relationship Peewee would have liked to claim.

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Peewee sat on the breakwater beside the lake, awaiting her. The day was warm and bright with sun, but he had begun to think that he was to be disappointed. It was, he felt certain, almost four o'clock, and he had seen no sign yet of the limousine either on the drive or on the cross street. Then suddenly he looked up and saw her.

She had not come in the motor; she had come on foot. What was still more unusual, she was not strolling along the esplanade. She was coming from the direction of the drive, and, by her look, directly to him. He had a frightened sense of something new and extraordinary in her.

"Don't run away," she called to him across the grass.

Her smile checked his momentary panic.
{{nop}}

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"Why don't we both sit down?" she offered, when she had reached him. She seated herself on the concrete step above the breakwater and waited, while he gazed at her uncertainly. He felt indefinitely that he ought to go away; then, in spite of himself, he sat down beside her. He did not tell himself consciously that there was tension in her which she was trying to hide, but he was apprehensive.

"This is a nice place to come," she said.

"Yes'm," he replied.

"You come here almost every day, don't you?"

"Yes'm."

"Is that because you find it pleasanter here than at home?"

His pulse quickened. "Yes'm."

"Where is your home?" she asked.

He looked at her with calculated innocence; the uneasiness with which she had impressed him increased. "What'm?" he asked.

"Where do you live?"

Anybody, he understood, might ask that question, but the feeling she gave him was that she

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was trying to find out about him. He scuffed his broken, too-large shoes against the concrete in embarrassment. His large, innocent eyes, as blue as hers and fringed with their long black lashes, studied her. They would not, he knew, reveal to her his thought. The duplicity and self-confidence he had gained in his combat with charity workers and agents anxious to incarcerate him in institutions assured him of that. If they had not been able to find out from him things he did not want to tell, neither, he was quite confident, could she.

"On Desplaines Street," he prevaricated.

"Will you tell me the number?"

He gave a number, chosen swiftly and at hazard, but it was astutely suited to a neigh borhood in which he might live.

"That is a long way from here," she said thoughtfully. "How is it that I have seen you here so often? Do you come all that distance every day?"

He decided he must distract her from this line of thought. "When I don't work," he answered craftily.
{{nop}}

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"Work?" Her voice showed her surprise. "Does a little boy like you work? What do you do? Sell newspapers?"

Was her question merely natural? There were not many things, he knew, which so small a boy could do except sell newspapers; but it was not plain whether she was aware of that or whether her inquiry showed some knowledge of him.

"I take bundles," he replied after reflecting.

"For whom?"

Again he thought. "For a drug store."

"What drug store?"

"Near us."

"Us. Who is that you live with?"

Now, he felt he could completely throw her off. "I live with my mudder," he answered with no appreciable pause.

He saw her looking keenly at him. "What is your name?"

He gave her one which he had spelled out on a sign on his way there.

"And your first name?" "Tom."

He waited anxiously. When she spoke again,

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he marked the nervous catching of her voice.

"Does your—father live with you?"

She knew, then, was the first feeling that he had; or if she did not know, something had directed her at least in the direction of the truth. She suspected some mystery about his father. He choked, "Yes'm."

"What does your father do?"

"He buys old things." He was sticking desperately to the fiction he had started.

"You mean old furniture?"

"No'm." His gaze, wandering despairingly, rested on his frayed trouser-knee. "Old clo'es."

"Have you any brothers or sisters?"

"Yes'm."

"Tell me about them."

"Sure." He went swiftly into details of an imaginary family; he would create, he thought, enough relatives to convince her if he could.

"Do any of them"—he heard the slight catch in her voice—"look at all like you?"

"What'm?"

"Children in the same family often look alike. You know that, don't you?"
{{nop}}

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"Yes'm."

"Do any of the other children look like you?"

He took time for natural reflection—nothing more. "Yes'm."

"Then people would know that you and they were brothers and sister?"

"Sure."

"And they and you—Do you look like your father?"

"Sure."

"You've always called him 'father,' I suppose?"

"Sure I call my fadder 'fadder'."

His throat had dried. Did she know so much that he could not deceive her? She was questioning him obviously for a purposed end. He felt her slender fingers grasp his chin. He did not resist as she turned his face upward to hers, and he met miserably, but with pretended frankness her long tense scrutiny of his features. Her eyes, he saw, were indecisive and uncertain. She drew a deep, troubled breath.

"Did you ever," she asked, when he had

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waited through her long pause, "hear the name Markyn?"

He considered, in his panic, how to answer that. "Yes'm."

"Where?"

"It's on wagons."

"Yes; on trucks. The Markyn Transfer Company—that is what you mean?"

"Yes'm."

"You've never heard it anywhere else?"

"No'm."

She paused again. "Or," she said nervously, "the name Lampert?"

He swallowed. "No'm."

"You might know the man without knowing his name—a very big, rough man. He used to be a barn boss once for that company we just spoke about—the Markyn Company. Do you know any barn boss? Do you know any man like that?"

"No'm."

He watched anxiously to see what the result of his replies had been. He thought relievedly that he saw conviction forming in her now that

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he was not the boy whom she had feared he was. It gave him no sense of triumph if this was so, but only of escape. What he understood most plainly was that, if she knew about him, it would hurt her; then she would shrink away from him. He could not imagine anything more terrible than to have her hate him. He was struggling against feelings that made him want to cry. He wanted to touch her; he wanted her to touch him again.

She had got up; when he looked up at her, he saw her holding out a dollar to him. His thought did not supply the reason why he did not like to receive even that benefit from her.

"You'd better take it," she urged. "You don't have to take it home, you know; you can spend it on moving picture shows."

He understood that she could not know that he had had nothing to eat since the night before. He had not recollected that himself until he saw the dollar; he did not waste thought on anything so ordinary as missed meals. As he got up and took the money, he observed some definite change in the way she looked at him. She was thoughtful; her thoughts, he saw, were not

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happy, but they appeared to stir her to tenderness toward him.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" she asked. "Do you need help in any way?"

"No'm."

"Is your mother kind to you?"

He thought of the dissolute, dead woman, who had said she was his mother; toward her his only feeling had been fear.

"Yes'm," he told her.

"Then she loves you. She might love you and still not be kind; but if she is kind she surely loves you. Love is what makes it terrible to be a mother. It is terrible to lose a child, but it must be almost as terrible to see one grow up. Mothers give children to the world without knowing what their children are going to grow up to be, and no matter what a child becomes they have to go on loving it. Of course, you don't understand me."

"No'm."

"You can understand this at least, that bad boys break their mothers' hearts and good boys make them happy."
{{nop}}

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He had never considered anything like this before; it might be so, however, he decided. "Yes'm."

"So a boy when he is going to do anything, ought to think whether it will make his mother glad or sorry. Do you understand that?"

The newness of the idea made it extremely interesting. He could not recall much evidence of what she said in the mothers and sons whom he had impersonally observed, but he wanted to agree with her.

"Yes'm," he said.

"You'll do that, won't you?"

"Yes'm."

"You're a nice boy," she said, "in spite of all your dirt."

She was looking queerly down at him; she turned his face up again to hers and studied it, but not anxiously as she did before. Quite suddenly she bent down toward him. He did not know what she was going to do until her felt her lips. They were cool and sweet against his cheek. Then a sob rose in his throat, which closed to keep it back, and some unexpected

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startling feeling held him frozen. She too seemed stirred and startled; she trembled so that he could see it, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears. She stared an instant at him in this way, then turned and almost ran away from him across the grass.

When she had got a block away, he quickened suddenly into movement, and ran after her. He saw her go into his father's house, and stood a long while looking at the great luxurious dwelling, with its high iron fence to keep out intruders. She had talked, he was recalling now, for quite half an hour with him; she had shown interest in him—no matter what the cause—and the recollection warmed him.

While he watched, a woman in striped kitchen dress came out at a rear door and threw away some refuse, and the sight reminded him of his dollar. As he went slowly back downtown, he was not consciously considering what her conversation with him must mean. To an older person, that she had connected the name Lampert only with the barn boss would have been evidence that she did not know about his mother. It was plain

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that she suspected the existence of a child. She would have seemed, to an older person, to have been trying to deny within herself the possibility of that existence; to have been eager that he should convince her that he was not the child. But why should she connect the child with him? She had grown used to seeing him, perhaps, in thinking of the suspected child, she had perceived his amazing likeness to his father. This is what an older person might have supposed.

What Peewee felt was simply triumph. Someone had told her something—he did not know what or who; plainly it had not been told by his father. But his lies had convinced her that it was not true. She would remain convinced, he still could see her and she still would be happy.

Suddenly he halted, knicking one shoe miserably against the other; it had occurred to him that whoever had told her this much might tell her more. If she was told more, then lies would not convince her. He moved on, slowly and unhappily; it was plain to him that unless he knew that she was not going to be told anything more he could not dare to see her again.

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In a drug store at Division Street and State Peewee got his dollar converted into small change. Experience had taught him that, if he proffered so large a coin to spend, it might prove too great a temptation to the seller and he might get nothing back, but a boy asking for change had the air of one merely doing an errand. He exchanged three of his pennies at the alley door of a lunchroom for as large a piece of stale bread as they would buy, and moved on, eating it. He was still speculating as to what she could have been told.

He turned west at Chicago Avenue and his step quickened with decision. At this hour of the day and in summer he was not likely to be molested by agents of justice or charity, so he had the freedom of the streets. He caught the tailboard of an express wagon traveling in his

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direction, and at Halsted Street dropped again to the pavement. He crossed the long viaducts and bridges until he came to Fulton Street, and turned again and halted finally after a long walk.

Across the street from him trucks entered and came out of a dingy, low building, lettered, "Markyn Transfer Company Stable No. 1." As he crossed to one of the wide doors and looked in, the large men who moved about their affairs within, in a smell of gasoline and oil, paid no attention to him. There was, he knew, no risk of meeting here any member of the Markyn family; these people were underlings. He went in guardedly, expectant of being ordered out, but reached the door of the cage-like office unchallenged and looked in. He saw two clerks inside busy with papers. He stepped in and sat down upon the bench inside the door and watched the clerks and the drivers who passed in and out with their reports. When he had sat for half an hour, he noted that one of the clerks was becoming oppressed by his continued presence.
{{nop}}

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"What you waiting for, kid? "the man inquired.

"I'm waiting for Lampert."

"No one of that name here."

He observed in the second clerk an awakening of interest. "Used to be barn boss at Stable Three," the second clerk told the first one, "but the old man fired him. Get out, kid; no use."

Peewee had known he would not find Lampert here. "They said I'd find him here," he insisted craftily.

He sat hopefully a quarter hour more, noting that he was wearing out the patience of the second clerk.

"Where does Ben Lampert live?" the clerk finally asked one of the drivers.

The man did not know. Peewee passed five expectant minutes. A man then put his head in at the door. "You asking where Lampert lives?" he inquired of the clerk. He gave a number on South State Street.

"There was a kid stuck here waiting for him."

Peewee saw over his shoulder the clerk look about for him and fail to find him; he had

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slipped out behind the man at the door as soon as he had heard the number. He moved south to Twenty-second Street, then east to State. There began to be, as he progressed toward his destination, more colored people on the sidewalks and standing in the doorways. He spelled out on the store windows signs advertising porters' supplies. The building corresponding to the address which he had heard was large and dingy; there were entrances leading to apartments along its front and there were also, as he could see through a long narrow hall which had no doors, apartments in the rear. He followed this hall, which led him into an evil-smelling court littered with rubbish. Both white and colored people lived here, and exterior stairways led upward from the court to their small apartments.

Each person, the Greek had said, had two grandfathers, and Lampert, Peewee comprehended, being his mother's father, bore that relation to him. He assumed from the contrast between the dismal room where his mother had died and fine house where his father lived, that

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his mother's father would live in one of the smaller apartments at the rear of the building rather than in one of the better ones in front. But he could not determine which apartment it was without inquiries which he did not dare to make. He had no definite plan regarding Lampert, but was curious about him because his name had been connected with whatever Mrs. Markyn had been told. Was it Lampert who had told her? After studying the apartments a long while from the court, he went out again into the street.

By ten o'clock he had wandered as far as Thirty-first Street, and was begining to think about a place where he could sleep. He turned into a wide street and, in its darkest spot, stopped and put two of his pennies in a separate pocket; then he carefully wrapped the remaining ninety-five cents in a rag which he had picked up and put them inside his shirt. He followed a passageway between two buildings and knocked at a basement door. An unkempt old woman, in return for his two pennies, admitted him into a darkened, musty cellar. He followed her

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across the floor where numerous figures, some large, some small, were already stretched in sleep, and lay down in the corner which she pointed out.

In the morning, when the uncomfortable forms about Peewee began to stir, he got up and went out. It was just beginning to be light. He followed an alley to the north and, in the damp chill of morning, sat down against a stable door to wait. He had learned by now the methods of the flower business. The opposing door, which he was watching, was a florist's. It was unlocked after a time, as the neighborhood began to awaken, and was left standing open. He could see the florist inside, sorting his stock. The man threw the most faded flowers away, put the fresh ones back, and put aside those which were not fresh enough for sale but were still not quite faded. As soon as he had finished, Peewee went in and bargained for a handful of carnations of the last sort. He wrapped them carefully in a newspaper and went along the alley and the streets, crossing the railroad tracks to the lake, where he sat down

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on the narrow strip of beach. He picked the most faded leaves from his flowers and broke off the dead ends of their stems. Then he dug a hole with his fingers in the sand, and the bottom of the hole filled at once with water. He laid the flowers round the hole with their stems in the water, and covered them with his newspaper.

In the early afternoon he gathered up his flowers and went back to Thirty-first Street. By dark, the flowers which he had not sold were so faded that when he offered them people only laughed; and he was back close to the building where Lampert lived. He had decided now, with reference to Lampert, that he would merely go into the court and wait. People would be passing in and out, perhaps Lampert among them, and something might occur to point him out to him.

With dusk a fog had come in from the lake, which turned to water on the stair-rails and the eaves and dripped into the court. In the mist and darkness which filled the badly lighted court, he could not tell much about the people passing

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except as they entered or left the long hall. He had been watching there an hour when he saw come into the court the colored girl who had been his mother's maid—dressed in expensive clothes which did not fit her and teetering as she walked on her high-heeled shoes. He got up nervously. She might not recognize him. He had no specific reason for fearing her if she did, but he watched her anxiously. She crossed the court, passing him, and hesitated at the foot of the stairs. She turned back then, repassing him, and faced him from the entrance to the court.

"What you doin' in here, honey?"

"Nothin'."

What her recognition might signify as regarded himself, he did not know. There was, he appreciated, no means of exit from the court except the hall. He approached her watchfully, depending upon his quickness to dodge past, but she was too quick for him and seized him by the arm.

"This here," she exulted, "must be my lucky night!"
{{nop}}

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He had ceased struggling as soon as he had tested the firmness of her grasp. Whatever she might mean to do with him could not be frustrated by physical action on his part; experience long before had taught him the futility of such struggles with grown-ups. His short legs could hardly keep pace with her, as she hurried him up one of the long stairs and into a dark hall, where she knocked upon a door.

There came a challenge from within.

"It's Mignon," she replied.

The door opened, blinding him with light, and he staggered forward as she pushed him violently into the room.

"Here is the boy," he heard her say.

It was, as he perceived as he stood blinking, a small room, poorly furnished and lighted by a lamp. A similarly lighted connecting room made up the apartment. A table with an oilcloth cover stood in its middle; there was a couch plainly used for sleeping. He saw staring curiously at him an elderly woman, a younger woman in unsuitably expensive clothes and

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wearing rings, and a big man with a red-veined face.

Peewee never had seen any of them before and he did not at once speculate as to who these people might be, but looked at them belligerently, determined that he would not be afraid. The man came forward and took hold of him and turned him to the light.

He exploded an oath of astonishment.

The reason for his astonishment did not appear to be plain to the colored girl. The man took Peewee's small hand in his immense one and opened the fingers which held the faded flowers; he did this roughly.

"What were you doing with these?" he asked. "Selling them?"

Peewee swallowed. "Yes."

The man swore again and threw the flowers against the wall. He turned to the colored girl and seemed about to say something, but checked himself. He went to the younger of the two other women and spoke to her, but Peewee could not hear what he said. Then he came back, and led the boy into the small connecting bedroom.
{{nop}}

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"You'd just as leave stay in here a little while," he said. "There ain't anybody going to hurt you, you know. You understand that, don't you?"

Peewee gulped nervously. "Yes, sir."

"All right, then."

He closed the door, while Peewee stared at him uneasily. Who were these people? What did they mean to do with him? He looked questioningly around the room. There was an open trunk in it, besides the bed and the one chair. The trunk's contents of rich-looking dresses, but torn and spotted, were scattered on the open lid and hung upon its sides. Peewee's breathing tightened queerly as he caught the faint perfume which came from the clothing and filled the room, and he moved closer, looking at the things. The scent was unmistakable and unforgettable as he touched the dresses; his mother's bedroom had been heavy with this strong perfume on the day she died. Were these his mother's things?

He could hear voices in the other room—the man's voice, the colored girl's voice, then the

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voice of the younger of the two women. They spoke in low tones and he could not distinguish what they said. The door opened and the elder woman came in. She pulled about the dresses in the trunk, took one and went out again, reclosing the door. The voices began again. Had they put him in here in order that he might not hear what was said? Finally the door was opened and the younger woman entered.

She sat down upon the bed and drew him to her. "What do you call yourself?" she asked.

He told her: "Peewee."

"That's not a real name. You know it ain't that, don't you?"

"Yes'm."

"What is your real name?"

He was silent; he had never accepted any other name. He was regaining confidence; her manner reassured him.

"You remember the day you saw your mother?"

"Yes'm."

"What did she call you?"

He replied after an instant: "Walter."
{{nop}}

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"Then that is your real name, ain't it?"

He thought it best to agree with her. "Yes'm."

"Then if anybody asked you, you'd tell them that?"

"Yes'm." He kept unexpressed a mental reservation.

"What did you think of your mother?"

He could not reply; he had no opinion of his mother. His silence seemed to satisfy the woman, and his gaze went to the rings upon her hands, one of which, distinctly unforgettable, recalled his dead mother's thin hands stretched stiffly on the coverlet.

"You have her ring," he said.

She laughed. "That's right," she assented. "She was the bad one; I was the good one. Now I wear her things."

Comprehension was coming to him; he had thought that the man must be Lampert and now he was sure.

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The certainty as to the identity of the big man did not, however, tell Peewee who the women were, and he speculated upon this as the younger woman led him back into the other room. The colored girl, he saw, had gone. The dress was gone, too. She must, he thought, have taken it away with her. The man stood gazing down at him.

"Are you hungry?" the man inquired.

"Yes sir," Peewee replied at once. There was never but one answer to this question.

"What is it you like best to eat?"

Peewee reflected; the question opened attractive possibilities. "Strawberries," he decided.

"Go out and get some strawberries," the man said to the younger woman.

The woman went out. The man paced slowly

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about the room, thinking. Peewee watched him questioningly. Was it possible the man was going to give him strawberries? His directions to the woman indicated that, but experience had taught Peewee to guard against disappointment. The return of the woman bringing the berries confirmed the man's intention. Peewee looked on expectantly while she washed the berries and put them in a dish upon the table; she put sugar on them and spread bread with butter.

"This what you wanted?" the man inquired.

"Yes, sir."

"Say, 'yes, {{SIC|grandfather|grandfather.}}{{' "}}

Peewee eyed the berries. "Yes, grandfather."

The man pointed to the older woman. "Call her 'grandmother'," he directed.

"Yes, grandmother," said Peewee.

The man motioned to the other woman. "Call her 'Aunt Nettie'."

"Yes, Aunt Nettie."

"You're always to call us by those names, never by anything else. Do you understand?"

Peewee reflected. His father's family, he had

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appreciated, were anxious—those of them who knew—to deny his relation to them; his mother's family, as it now appeared, was not only eager to claim the relationship but insisted that he should claim it too. The reason for this, he could not guess. He had no more wish to be related to them than to the Markyns, but he could smell the strawberries.

The younger woman set a chair and helped Peewee up into it. He took a spoon in one dirty hand and bread and butter in the other. It was, he thought, with his mouth full of bread and berries, inexplicable that Mrs. Markyn had called Lampert "rough." A man who gave boys strawberries must, it appeared to him, be classified as kind. And Lampert proceeded to give further evidence of that.

"How'd you like to have strawberries every day?" he asked.

"I'd like it."

"Grandfather," Lampert warned.

"I'd like it, grandfather."

"Even in winter when they have to be grown in hothouses?"
{{nop}}

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"Yes, grandfather."

"How'd you like to have nice clothes—warm ones for winter and cool ones for summer?"

"I'd like it."

"How'd you like to have a nice bed to sleep in, in a nice room?"

"I'd like it."

"How'd you like to have roller skates? How'd you like to have a bicycle? How'd you like to have an automobile to ride in?"

"I'd like them, grandfather."

"All right; I'll get you all those things."

Peewee stared at Lampert in amazement. He perceived the discrepancy between Lampert's promise and the surroundings in which he lived; he perceived also the man's sincerity in promising. Lampert intended to get him these things; he had apparently no doubt of his ability to get them. Peewee, looking at the women, saw in their faces comprehension and confidence in this ability. He himself stopped doubting. He shook with excitement so that he spilled his berries.

The elder woman, when he had finished, took

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the dishes and washed them at the sink. Lampert continued to pace up and down; he appeared to be continuing, silently, the same line of thought.

"That ain't all," he broke out. "What you going to be when you grow up?"

Peewee observed him silently; ideas upon this question had been fixed in him by his relationship to Jeffrey Markyn, Second, but the contrast between what he meant to be and what he was, prevented his confiding them.

"You don't understand," Lampert decided. "There's men that work for other men and get paid what they want to pay 'em and get fired when they want to fire 'em; and there's men that sit in offices and have big houses and servants; they work when they want to work. Which do you want to be?"

"Like that," said Peewee.

"What business?"

Peewee's reply was instantaneous. "Trucks!" Nothing had so impressed him with the importance of the family to which he was misallied as their ownership of trucks.
{{nop}}

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His life was made of what moved upon the streets; he admired taxicabs but he worshipped trucks.

"That's right!" Lampert exclaimed. "That's what it'll be. I'll see to it that you own trucks!"

Peewee studied him in bewilderment. Did he mean what he said? The man's tone had been again utterly sincere, and Lampert's own excitement confirmed this sincerity. Peewee surrendered himself to contemplation of what these things must mean for him. He would have at some delightful time a desk where he would sit and give orders to clerks and drivers; he would have a big house—a house bigger than his father's; he would give parties to guests dressed as he had seen people dress to attend the theater, and Mrs. Markyn would be there. She, in these imaginings, underwent no ageing, though Peewee himself had become grown up. The magnificence of this future dwarfed even the promised enjoyments of the present, but left him still impatient to have the fulfillment of Lampert's promises begin at once. He would

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have been content with the smallest of the things—the roller skates.

The elder woman moved about household affairs; Lampert had seated himself with his forehead in his hands. He was planning, Peewee decided, the best way of getting the things. Peewee was beginning to adore Lampert. The younger woman washed Peewee's face and hands at the sink, and he submitted meekly to this indignity, which had become unimportant. She spread a coverlet and pillow on the floor in the inner room.

"You sleep in there," she directed.

He judged that she thought it time for him to go to bed; it was unusually early for him, but he lay down obediently. It was useless, for thought prevented him from sleeping. Would the fulfillment of Lampert's promises begin to-morrow? Would he have to wait longer than that? The morning might bring the skates and bicycle. He heard the two women come in and go to bed; he heard Lampert go to bed upon the couch. It was plain, therefore, that the

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morning was the earliest anything could be expected.

Peewee awoke at daylight, but lay still until he heard the others getting up. The younger woman went out early—he thought, to work. When, later, Lampert went out, he waited eagerly for his return. The older woman idled about the slatternly rooms or sat still doing nothing. The morning passed. When, in the afternoon, Lampert came back, he did not bring anything. Peewee, disappointed, wanted to inquire, but decided nothing would be gained by questions. The woman went out to do her marketing, and it drew toward four o'clock.

Suddenly Lampert sprang up and listened. Someone had asked a question in the court and the voice, though not the words, echoed by the enclosing walls, stirred Peewee queerly but indefinitely. It appeared also to have stirred Lampert. He went to the window and looked out and then spun quickly around.

"You get in there!" he ordered roughly.

Peewee sped into the smaller room. Lampert

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came and closed the door upon him. Whoever had spoken in the court—it must be that person, he thought—was coming up the stairs. He heard Lampert open and close the outer door; then, as the voice he had heard spoke again, still unintelligibly but now in the next room, his flesh prickled. Was the man who had come in his father? The timbre of the voice seemed to tell him that, but he could not be certain.

He waited, listening. The voice spoke again and seemed to be demanding something. Lampert replied, collectedly and harshly. Peewee shook with anxiety. What was going on? He crept closer to the door, crouched there he presently could begin to distinguish words.

"I'm letting you do the asking?" It was Lampert who had said this.

He could not make out the words of the reply. Then he again heard Lampert:

"Do your talking. I expected that."

"You come to my house; you ask to see my wife."

This was the other and Peewee could hear

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plainly now; the man had perhaps changed his position in the room. "You mouth some indefinite and untrue story about my supporting a child somewhere. You pretend not to know the parentage of the child or why I am interested in it."

"That was just a starter, Markyn."

Peewee's body drew together at the name. Coupled with the voice it gave him certainty. This was his father. Had someone told his father he was there? He considered that there was no need to be afraid, as Lampert would protect him.

"The law has a name for such an act as that, and punishes it." His father had said that.

"I ain't worrying."

"If you had come to me—"

"It didn't look good to me to go to you. I wanted you to come to me."

"I comprehended that."

"The reason I went to her was so you'd have to come here."

This must mean that Lampert was the one who had told Mrs. Markyn about Peewee. Peewee

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had suspected that, but now he was not willing to believe that of Lampert. Still, she had known the name, and he could not find any other meaning for the words.

"That is the reason then for your telephoning the address here to my office to-day."

"That's right. I wanted you to know where I was, and hurry you."

There was a long silence. Were the men speaking too low for him to hear? Had they left the room? Apparently neither of these suppositions were true, for at last he heard his father's tones again, but now they were queerly changed and flattened.

"How much is it that you want?"

"To keep away from her, you mean?"

"Yes; and to let this rest in every way."

"That's two things, Markyn; take 'em one at a time. How much do I want for promising to keep away from her? Nothing."

"Then I don't understand."

"It's plain, ain't it?"

"Still—I don't understand."

"I don't intend to go to her again. It ain't

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necessary. When I went to her I didn't have the boy."

Peewee stiffened. The boy? That was himself. Lampert had told his father he was here, or at least had told enough so that his father must suspect that he was here. Why had he told him that? He was no longer so sure of Lampert's kindness.

There was again silence. Peewee thought that Lampert was expecting a reply; his voice came again presently.

"See that you get me right," it said. "I have the boy."

When there was still no answer, his voice went on gloatingly. "What was the second of those things you mentioned? How much do I want to let this rest? I want whatever ought to be coming to the boy. I want a home for him and for his grandparents—that's me and Mrs. Lampert. I want credit at the grocery. I want a car for him and me and her to go driving in."

Peewee comprehended. It was not Lampert who would give him the things; it was his father whom Lampert expected would give them.
{{nop}}

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"The law prescribes the allotment to the child in such a case as this." His father was speaking now. "But I'm willing to do much more than it decrees. I'm anxious to have him taken care of, Lampert."

"That's twice you've spoken of law. If there's any going to law to be done, I'll be the one that does it. You're afraid of law. Goin' to law in this thing means scandal. Scandal don't bother me. I'm getting old—too old to like to work. The best job I ever had a man named Markyn fired me from. Before that, that same man took my daughter. Her boy—his boy, too—looks so much like that man that anyone can see that he's his son. Maybe I'll have to show people the boy. How do I know the boy wasn't born in wedlock? That's for the law to find—not me. I didn't know so much about my daughter all those years! I ain't afraid of scandal. But how about its worrying you? How about its worrying Mrs. Markyn?"

"I am willing to do for the boy anything that is within reason, Lampert."

Peewee straightened excitedly. He perceived

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that Lampert's promises were going to be fulfilled. His father and Lampert would come to an agreement. It did not matter, he comprehended now, that Lampert might have let his father suspect that he was here. It might even be necessary for Lampert to open the door between the rooms and show him to his father, since Lampert's possession of him was the reason for the agreement.

"Let's talk this over." This was his father.

"You're right, we'll talk it over. What we'll talk over is how much you're going to do. I'm thinking of my daughter. She lived hard and rough. Her mother grieved about her; she didn't like to hear folks talk. You started her that way. A girl like that had ought to pick up something in her life and leave a bank-account for her old father and her mother. If she don't what's the use of living in that way? I always thought she'd leave a little pile for us. She didn't. She would if you'd done by her as you'd ought. What you didn't do then for her it's right that you ought to do now for us and for the boy."
{{nop}}

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Peewee began to comprehend. Lampert might not expect his father to agree to all that he was going to ask, but his father would agree to part of it. Peewee knew the ways of chicanery, for he had lived among people who practiced them and talked about them, and he had heard people say that they would like to get a rich man into the position which his father would be in. When Lampert had received in the beginning as much as he could get, he would begin to ask for more. There would be no place where his father would find it possible to stop, until perhaps Peewee even owned his father's trucks, as Lampert had promised him. For his father, when he had once commenced giving, could not escape from Lampert except by openly acknowledging Peewee, and he would not do this because of Mrs. Markyn. Peewee could have all these things. Perhaps, besides that, he could still see Mrs. Markyn without her knowing who he was.

But he felt, he discovered, uncomfortable when he thought of seeing Mrs. Markyn. It would be ridiculous, he had comprehended pre-

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cociously when she had spoken to him about how to tell what it was right to do, for him to think in that connection of his dissolute mother; but the fact that she had told him that made him think in that way about herself. Suppose he should take what Lampert would get for him and then, in some way, Mrs. Markyn should find it out. Would she think better or worse of a boy who had been getting things in that manner? It did not require reasoning to perceive that she would think less of the boy. The fact was instinctive and incontrovertible that she would feel sorry that she had kissed that boy and that she would unquestionably hate him.

If he had not been shut up in that room, he decided, he would simply have gone away. Then, if she found this out he could tell her that he had not had anything to do with it.

Peewee went to the window and looked out. A rope used for drying clothes ran through a pulley fastened to the sash. A boy—even a small boy—by standing on the window sill could reach the rope, and need merely lean upon it and he could step from the window

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sill to the stair-railing below it and a little to one side.

His father's voice, then Lampert's voice, were sounding in the other room, as he climbed out upon the sill. He balanced himself upon the railing and jumped down upon the stair. He choked and his eyes filled with tears as he ran down the stairs, across the court and out into the street. If he could have had just one of all those things—perhaps the skates—it would not, he thought, have been so hard. He had never had anything like that but he had seen other boys have them. After a moment he blinked the tears away and began to look from side to side to see whether anything interesting was happening in the street.

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Peewee's determination to avoid his father had become an emotion very much like being afraid. He did not like to think what his father would do, if he caught him, to a child whose existence compelled him to pay blackmail and threatened such unhappiness to his wife. What would Lampert do to a boy who by running away had interfered with his getting an easy life without doing any work? Peewee's imagination shrank from picturing these things. To avoid rediscovery by Lampert he gave up selling flowers.

He realized that he did not know what his father looked like. Twice he had heard his father's voice and would recognize that, but on neither occasion had he seen him. He could not be sure of recognizing him by his likeness to

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himself. Any man he passed who had dark hair and blue eyes might be his father.

These considerations put a limitation on the streets he frequented. He did not want to go to the North Side, where his father lived, or to Madison Street, where boys knew him and where the agents of his father would probably be watching for him, or to the South Side where Lampert was. He stayed on the West Side, but this was where representatives of the Juvenile Court were most likely to apprehend him, and he suspected that his father and Lampert would be watching the Juvenile Court.

His daily expenditures for living were not quite ten cents. He could, by strict economy, reduce this slightly, but reduction of expenditures did not solve the problem, since he had no money coming in. Mrs. Markyn, he knew, would have given him something to eat, but he did not know whether Lampert had not told her more about him, and he was determined not to see her if that was so. When his money was gone, he began to spend long periods outside of bakery windows looking at the food, and to

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haunt the alleys next to factories where the employees ate their lunch, and construction jobs at the hour when the laborers opened their tin pails. He found, in default of other place to sleep, a nightly shelter under a tarpaulin spread over bags of cement where the new Market Street bridge was being built.

The day was damp with a mist off the lake; the hour was noon; the laborers engaged upon the bridge had stopped work for lunch. Seated inconspicuously upon a pile of iron, Peewee watched the man nearest him devouring a huge chunk of bread. Some of the bread, it was incontestible, was going to be left. Peewee had considered asking in advance for this prospective remainder. He had decided against that as likely to arouse opposition. The more effective way, he had decided, was merely to sit close by and watch.

Assured finally that the man had eaten all he could, he moved to attract attention. The man looked at him. Having given him this long, reflective look, the man's gaze returned with satiety to the bread and he threw it into

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the river. Peewee sighed deeply and stood up to find himself confronted by a larger boy.

"Hungry kid?" the boy inquired.

The question wrung a forced reply. "Sure."

"I know where we can eat."

Peewee doubtfully surveyed the boy. He could not, he decided, be an emissary of his father or of Lampert. "All right," he said.

He followed as the boy crossed the railroad tracks to Kinzie Street and there turned east. They were, it seemed likely, headed toward a neighborhood where he would have preferred not to go; his father lived to north and east of them. But the boy's indifference as to whether Peewee followed him or not appeared additional testimony that he could not have anything to do with Peewee's father. Having traveled a half-dozen blocks east on Kinzie Street, they turned north on Rush.

Peewee looked inquiringly at the numerous small restaurants on this street, but he comprehended that if any of these had been their destination they would have been traveling in the alleys; he was not welcome at restaurant front

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doors. When they had gone a full mile north, past the point where Rush Street merged into State, the boy again turned east and north, and Peewee began to study him with disturbance. They were near his father's house, on a street of fine houses, which he spelled out was "Astor Street." The inhabitants of these houses, he felt, sure, would not extend any courtesies to a small and very dirty person like himself. Yet the boy could not be merely taking him through this neighborhood, bordered within sight ahead of them by Lincoln Park. He followed the boy doubtfully through a narrow passage between two of the houses, and emerged behind another dwelling which, his immense experience of the backs of houses and of areaways and yards assured him, must face upon the Lake Shore Drive. He could not remember ever having seen a larger house.

He halted suspiciously to observe the boy. To his amazement, the boy pushed open a basement door, and Peewee, bewildered by his guide's temerity, followed him in and looked curiously around a large, square hall. The hall

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he saw, connected with rooms for servants' uses and with a labyrinth of passages and stairs. A very old colored man, dressed in a dark green suit with peculiarly obvious buttons, came to one of the doors at which the boy had knocked, listened to something said to him by the boy, and looked inquiringly at Peewee.

"You ah shuah," the old man asked quaveringly, "dat dis am de right boy?"

The boy answered something which Peewee could not hear. The old man, leaving the door open, shuffled back into the room and got some money and gave it to the boy.

Peewee darted toward the door, but he had not got half way across the hall when he felt the boy clutch him from behind. He at once stood still; there was no hope in struggling with the larger boy. He allowed his captor to lead him back to the old man, who put him into the room and turned the key upon him.

He panted as he clung for support against the door; he had forgotten he was hungry. He was caught, he felt certain, by his father. The trembling in his legs appeared to denote that he

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was in danger of feeling frightened, and he went to a chair and sat down. He could hear nothing except the ticking of a clock. He must have been here fully half an hour when the key turned in the lock and the old servant put in his head.

"Follow me, boy," he directed.

Peewee got up belligerently and followed him up a winding stair into the most luxurious hall that he had ever seen. There were dark pictures on the wall which seemed very old; there were hangings of dim-colored cloths into which figures of mounted men fighting with swords had been woven. The negro led him across the hall to a room with books about its walls—a library more luxurious even than the hall, with spindling reading-lamps of bronze and great padded chairs and couches. He hung back, recognizing that whoever he was being taken to must be in that room, and his heart stopped as the servant pushed him in, for the person awaiting him was Mrs. Markym.

She flushed eagerly at sight of him and seemed to check herself. Her first interest in him,

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caused merely by his interest in her, had been increased by her anxiety when she had recognized his likeness to his father. It had become still deeper and now more definite; he did not realize this, but her manner terrified him with suspicion that she certainly now knew who he was. She had her hat on, he noted, and the kind of dress which women wear upon the street; she had come then from outside, and she was breathing quickly as though she had come on foot. He recalled the half hour he had waited in the room below. Had he been kept there while she had been sent for?

"That is all, Burtin," she said to the servant.

He drew back from her, but she came toward him impulsively, when the servant had gone out, and took his small, dirty hands and seated herself holding him in front of her.

"Where have you been?" she asked, looking eagerly in his eyes.

He looked up at her without answer. The feelings she excited in him were deepened by his anxiety as to how much she knew. She drew him against her knee. A faint sweetness came

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from her as though her clothes were kept where there was a pleasant smell.

"It has been a long time," she said, "weeks. You didn't come where I used to see you."

He shuffled one foot upon the other and fixed his eyes upon her nervously.

"Was that because you hadn't told me the truth about yourself?"

He seized this as an excuse. "Yes'm."

"Why did you tell me what you did?"

He hung his head, not finding any plausible answer to this.

"You aren't afraid of me?"

"No'm."

"Then why was it? You told me what you said was your name," she urged, "and where you lived. I thought perhaps there was something I could do for you. I went there to find out and I found there was no family of that name."

"Yes'm," he admitted. It was not safe to try to lie.

"The boys at the children's bathing beach knew you by sight—they'd seen me talking

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with you. I told them I would pay any boy who brought you here."

Why here? he wondered. What was this place?

"Was any of what you told me true?" she questioned.

"No'm."

"Then why did you tell it to me?"

He swallowed. In the doubt he felt his wide experience with workers of charity and justice had taught him that the safest method was pathos. "I didn't want to say I didn't know," he answered mournfully.

"You mean you haven't any family."

"Yes'm."

"And you were ashamed to tell me that?"

"Yes'm." He seized eagerly this motive which she had supplied him; she could not know, he understood, that he had been glad he had no family.

"What is your real name?"

"Peewee."

"You haven't any other name than that?"

"No'm."
{{nop}}

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"You mean, I think, that you don't know what your name ought to be. Is that it?"

"Yes'm."

"You don't know who your mother is?"

If she asked that, she herself did not know. The time to lie had come. "No'm."

"Or your father?"

"No'm." He watched to see what the effect of this would be upon her. She released him and stood up. Her full lip trembled and she caught it between her teeth. "I thought that," she whispered to herself. "Oh, that is what I thought!"

He studied her perplexedly. If she knew this about him, why did not his likeness to his father tell her all? She stooped and put her arms around him.

"Do you know why I had you brought here?" she inquired.

"To ask me."

"The things that I have asked you? Yes. But it wasn't only that. I'm not going to let you go away again. There's someone here who's promised to take care of you."
{{nop}}

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He stared about wonderingly. This fine house plainly could not be an institution.

"I'm going to take you to him."

The person was a man then. He speculated nervously on this as she led him across the hall to a doorway hung with curtains.

"You mustn't be afraid of him," she said. "He frightens people sometimes, but he will be kind to you. He was once a boy upon the streets and without friends himself."

"I don't get afraid," he returned to her.

She drew the curtains aside and pushed him gently in and went in with him.

"Here is the boy," he heard her say.

He looked about. It was a small, rich room where a wood fire was burning on the hearth, but his gaze had appreciated no more than this when it stopped with a jerk upon the only occupant. A huge old man sat by the fireside in a great arm chair. His age, to Peewee, seemed great. His cold, fiercely direct gray eyes were fixed on the boy intently; his big, imperious mouth and square, projecting chin were firmly set; his huge hands grasped the elbows

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of his chair, as if even his resting had a sort of violence in it.

His expression, as he studied Peewee, changed from mere attention into startled surprise.

"Come here," he ordered harshly.

He put his immense hand under Peewee's chin, as Mrs. Markyn pushed him forward to him, and turned up his face to look at it. Then he looked as if in amazement at Mrs. Markyn. She met his look courageously, but flushed and bent over Peewee as though to hide her embarrassment.

There was, Peewee perceived, a mystery here. Mrs. Markyn's embarrassment perplexed him. Had the old man recognized his likeness to his father? If he had done that and if Mrs. Markyn also recognized it, she ought to push him away from her, and hate him, and burst into tears perhaps, over the destruction of her happiness. She did not, it was true, look happy; but neither did she look like a person whose life had been reduced to ruin.

The impossibility of accounting for all this confused him.
{{nop}}

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"You'll stay here with him?" she asked.

"Yes'm," he answered promptly.

"There's no one else here," she said. "He lives all alone."

He did not need this assurance. He suspected from the old man's manner to her that she came frequently to this house. Now that her suspicions of his identity did not produce the effect he had expected on her, he would have stayed anywhere with anybody, where there was a chance of seeing her.

He stared after her in utter absorption as she went away. He heard a bell ring somewhere and perceived that it was the old man who had rung it and that it caused a servant to appear.

"Get Burtin," the man directed to the servant, "and take him and fix him up."

The servant went away and returned after a moment with the negro. Peewee went with them to the second floor. He did not resist, as in a pretty bedroom the negro began to undress him and the other man turned on the water in a tub. They lifted him and set him in the bath. As they dried him and wrapped him in a blanket,

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the negro looked at his small, bruised body with interest. The inspection seemed to convey some idea to him. He spoke to the other servant, who went away and returned with a tray holding preserves, bread and tea, which was almost milk. Peewee sat with the blanket wrapped about him, and the servant stood by to hand him what he wanted. He ate ravenously, but it interfered a little with his eating to keep his eyes fixed upon the man.

The negro, who had left the room, came back bringing several small suits of clothes of varying sizes. Peewee thrilled expectantly. The man held the clothes against him to find out which size was right, and the smallest nearly fitted. They put underclothing on him; he had not had underclothes since his last confinement in a home for boys. He held out his feet for the stockings and the shoes, and they put his legs into knickerbockers and his arms into a shirt with a wide collar.

He had difficulty in believing that the boy he could see in the mirror was himself. But when he put his hands into the pockets of his new

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clothes the boy in the mirror put his in too, and when he took them out the other boy did the same.

"Dis am to be youah room," the negro told him.

His heart beat fast in his amazement, and he looked about the room with wide opened eyes.

"Is thah anything else dat you-all requiah?" the negro asked him.

He could not find any answer to this, and he followed the servants in a daze to the door and looked after them as they went away.

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Peewee never had known any room which anyone had called his, and he had never slept anywhere indoors except where numbers of other people were sleeping, or had anything of his own except those small objects which boys acquire and carry in their pockets. To be left alone in the room gave him a feeling of possession which he had never had before, even though he did not fully accept the assurance that it was his. But he would have been more interested in the room if he had not been so much interested in the old man.

If the old man was the only person besides servants in the house, and had power to give Peewee a room in it, it appeared evident that the old man owned the house. It seemed an immense house for one man. Its front windows

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looked across the Drive and out upon the lake where white-tipped waves were chasing each other against the esplanade; its rear windows, he knew, having come in that way, looked only at the backs of other houses. Four blocks to north of it and three to west, as nearly as he could figure, was his father's house, which had amazed him by its luxury until he had seen this one.

He went from room to room on the second floor, looking into them and examining excitedly the beautiful things he found. The room which pleased him most was at the front of the house and apparently was a woman's room. Its furnishings were all exquisitely delicate, and there were articles monogrammed in fine tracery upon the dresser, and several small portraits in gold frames. One was of a woman whom he recognized; she was the one whose picture he had seen with Mrs. Markyn's at the newspaper office. What had her name been? Mrs. Arthur Cord. Another was of a man and his pulse quickened as he looked at it. He picked it up and held it so that he could see himself in the mirror while

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he looked at it. He and the man had the same distinctive, regular features and the same black hair, which grew in the same way upon their necks and temples. Was it his father? The man was handsome, but he had not the strong, determined look of the fierce old man downstairs.

After examining these things, Peewee went downstairs and looked in at the old man from the hall.

The old man showed no resentment at this inspection, and, after hestating, Peewee went into the room so that he could see him better. The old man returned his survey curiously.

"Had a bad time to get along?" he asked with interest.

"Yes, sir," Peewee admitted.

"Not much to eat lately?"

"No, sir."

"You look it. It's a hard town and you have to be hard yourself to beat it. Very different town from when I came here. Bigger and harder. I was ten then, but I'd been two years alone in Buffalo. Ran away from home when

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I was eight. I'd saved some money even then. Have you?"

"No, sir," Peewee replied.

"Time to begin. Save your money and put it out to work for you; then you don't have to work yourself. That's one rule. Another is don't let people deceive you. Did the boy that brought you here lie to you?"

"Yes, sir," said Peewee.

"What did you do to him?"

"Nothing."

"Know what to do when a boy lies to you?"

"No, sir."

"Hit him in the eye."

Peewee regarded him reflectively. It was probable the old man did not know that the other boy had been larger than himself, but the subject interested him.

"People don't care what happens to you, do they?" the old man asked.

Peewee considered; very few people, indeed, had ever cared. "No, sir," he agreed.

"You care what happens to them?"

"Yes, sir."
{{nop}}

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"Why should you, if they don't care about you? Know how they do about that on the Board of Trade?"

"No, sir."

"They don't care what happens to the other fellow. I've known of many a man sitting in his office—broke; don't know how to pay his rent; don't know how to feed his wife and kids; thinks he'll kill himself. On the Floor they throw up their hats; slap each other on the back; all join hands and dance around because they've broke him. Understand?"

"No, sir," said Peewee.

"Understand about the boys, though, don't you?"

"Yes, sir."

Who was the old man? He looked, Peewee thought, as though he too might be a "builder of Chicago." He had at least built this house, or someone had built it for him. It occurred to Peewee that he might be the first of the Jeffrey Markyns, the one who had no number to his name. His age made this appear likely, and his talk about the Board of Trade.
{{nop}}

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There were, however, contrary considerations. The spoon with which Peewee had eaten his preserves and the knife with which the servant had spread the butter had been marked with the letter "B." There had been "B" in the lace coverlets upon the beds and on the back of the toilet articles. Peewee started to ask the man his name, but when he saw the cold, hard eyes staring at him he was afraid. He backed to the door and, when he felt the opening behind him, backed out through it.

He halted in the hall, considering. Would the servants tell him who the man was if he asked? Would the man's name be on his front door? As he moved toward the door to open it and look, he saw upon his right the library with its shelves of books. In schools, he recalled, boys wrote their names in their books. Perhaps the old man had written his name in his. There seemed a great many of them for him to have written his name in. He went in and opened one of the books, which were all new, as though no one had ever read them, and he found a picture pasted in the front with letters under-

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neath. "Ex Libris," he spelled out. This, he decided, had no meaning, but there was a name below. He spelled it: "Matthew Beman."

The old man, it was clear, was Mrs. Markyn's grandfather, the one who made the feud—whatever that might be—with the first Jeffrey Markyn about a "corner." But Peewee forgot this temporarily in thinking excitedly how often Mrs. Markyn must come to her grandfather's house. What would she think of him when she saw him in his new clothes and with shoes which had no holes in them? She might hardly know him. He went to the window to look out along the street in the direction which he thought that she might come, but she did not come that day.

At dark the negro, Burtin, came and got him and took him downstairs to eat. He ate at a table with the servants, sitting next to Burtin, and regarding the old colored man reflectively between his bites.

"What is a corner?" he inquired at last.

The negro considered in surprise. "A cohneh?"

"I thought you knew about Mr. Beman."
{{nop}}

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"Indeedy yes, Ah does!"

"Didn't Mr. Beman ever make a comer?"

Burtin appeared to comprehend. "Mistah Beman he done made many cohnehs."

"He made the Markyn-Beman comer," Peewee observed.

"Dats too long ago for you-all to know about it—yeh, dat's long ago."

"Then tell me about it."

Burtin seemed to consider this request and to decide that it was not anything he need refrain from telling.

"Mistah Beman an' Mistah Mahkyn, dey wuz pahtnahs—dis yer Mistah Mahkyn's gran' fathah," he asserted. "One tahme befoh dey wuz reg'lah pahtnahs, dey onct boff of 'em wuz buyin' oats. Mistah Mahkyn he comes to Mistah Beman an' he says: "Oats am goin' up; de longah we hol' ouah oats, de highah up dey'll go. We-all 'll hold ouahs an' when dey gits so-high, we-all 'll sell ouahs, but not befoh dey gits so-high." "Aw right," says Mistah {{SIC|Beman. But|Beman. "But}} Mistah Mahkyn, he ups an' sells his oats befoh dey gits so-high, and never said nothin' to Mr. Beman 'bout

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it, 'cause he thought de mahket wouldn't buy so many oats. So Mistah Mahkyn, he made money because Mistah Beman held his oats, but his sellin' made dem oats go down and Mistah Beman, he didn' make nothin'. You undahstan'?"

Peewee did not understand, but he comprehended that if he admitted that he might not hear anything more. "Sure," he prevaricated.

"Den long tahme afteh—yeahs afteh—Mistah Beman and Mistah Mahkyn dey comes to be pahtnahs. But Mistah Beman, he didn't neber fohgit 'bout dem oats; he remembahs an' remembahs, an' remembahs. An' Mistah Beman an' Mistah Mahkyn dey stahted out to cohneh wheat. Dey done bought an' bought an' bought till Mistah Mahkyn he done thought dey had all de wheat into a cohneh. But dey wahn't no cohneh, because Mistah Beman he wuz sellin' all de tahme he wuz buyin', but Mistah Mahkyn he didn' know dat. So in de end, Mistah Beman had all de money and Mistah Mahkyn, he wah {{SIC|ruined.}}

This was not very plain, Peewee thought, but the result was clear: Mr. Markyn had been "broke" and had sat, probably, alone in his of-

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fice not knowing how to feed his wife and kids.

"Did Mr. Beman throw up his hat upon the floor?" he asked.

"Ah wouldn't wondah. 'Dat's like what you-all done to me about dem oats,' he said to Mistah Mahkyn; and afteh dat dey never spoke again, and de two fambiles didn't till Miss Marion mahried Mistah Waltah Mahkyn."

Peewee knew about that.

Burtin, when he took him to bed, would have helped him undress, but he would not submit to this indignity. He recalled, as he snuggled into the cool, smooth sheets, in the pleasant room, after the negro had left him, the cement bags among which he had slept the night before, but he thought with more excitement about Matthew Beman.

Beman had been, at one time, no different from Peewee himself, and had perhaps at some time crept in under a tarpaulin and shifted his feverish body through the night among cement bags. He had, it is almost certain, slept in cellars and had eaten unhealthy food from his dirty fingers in alleys and areaways, and had

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had no place to go except the streets. But now Beman had this wonderful house and had servants to get him everything he wanted. He had preserves and other food, and good clothes and motor cars, and knives and spoons and bedclothes which had his initial on them.

Certain doubts had occasionally assailed Peewee as to whether, when he was grown up, he actually would be able to do all the things he contemplated—to have a house larger than his father's and to be a "city-builder" like Jeffrey, Second—but the fact that Beman had been a street boy like himself had silenced all these doubts. Beman had begun when he was eight years old, he had told Peewee, to save money. Peewee resolved that when he got any money again he would save it. He expanded also his ideas of the house that he would have so that it became not merely larger than his father's but larger even than Beman's. He would have a room in it like the one where he had seen the pictures, but finer still, if that was possible, and this room would be for Mrs. Markyn. He decided to tell her of these plans.
{{nop}}

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He dressed hurriedly in the morning, so as to be ready to tell her when she came, and after breakfast he sat by the window watching for her, but she did not come. He wandered about the house and looked at things, and several times he went to the room where Beman had been the day before, but there was no one in it.

Late in the afternoon Burtin took him to the library. Beman was waiting for him there.

"Come here," Beman commanded.

Peewee approached uneasily.

"Can you read?"

"I can spell."

"Spell this then—spell it out loud."

Peewee took the written slip of paper which Beman handed him. The first words were his mother's name—Helen Lampert. "Born in Chicago," he then spelled out, "age thirty, never employed, associate of various men in Chicago, New York and Seattle, known also as Helen Howse and Heloise Labell, of late frequenter of West Side cafes."

"What do you think of your mother?" Beman inquired. "Not much, if you're wise."
{{nop}}

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"She's dead," Peewee offered hopefully. This appearance of hopefulness concealed an immense anxiety. Beman had not known who Peewee was on the day before; now he knew more about him than Mrs. Markyn did.

"I know she's dead," Beman retorted. "You there when she died?"

"Yes, sir." He had no idea how much Beman knew, and he was afraid to lie.

"Anybody else there?"

"The nurse."

"No one else?"

"No, sir."

"Anybody come there while you were there?"

"No, sir."

"Not a tall men; blue eyes—very blue, like yours; black hair like yours?"

"No, sir." His heart constricted anxiously. Beman, it appeared, knew who his father was.

"Sure about that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Mother did not tell you about any man?"

"No, sir," Peewee lied desperately. Whatever else Beman might know, he could not

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know what had been told him by his mother. They had been quite alone when, with her hot hands covered with their glistening rings, she clutched him down against her and held him while she made him write down his father's name.

"Don't know anything about this then?" Beman held out to him a second paper; this one was a printed clipping.

{{" '}}Reward,{{' "}} Peewee spelled out. {{" '}}For information as to the whereabouts of H. Seabury, approximately eight years old, formerly inmate of St. Anthony's Orphan Asylum and the following boys' homes.{{' "}} There was then a list of several homes. It was not signed with a name but merely "Room —, 100 Washington St."

Peewee looked up at Beman with combative eyes. He suspected that Beman might be inclined to claim the reward that was being offered for him.

"Ever see that ad. before?" Beman inquired.

"No, sir."

"Know that address?"

"No, sir."
{{nop}}

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"Don't know of any lawyer at that address? Lots of lawyers in that building. Might be one of them, you know."

It was exactly that, Peewee felt certain. He watched Beman's eyes and they showed that Beman knew it was a lawyer. "I don't know," he replied.

"Don't know who's advertising, you mean?"

"No, sir," Peewee iterated determinedly. He had, considering his youth, a disproportionate knowledge of lawyers; they had apparently no business of their own, therefore they were forced to occupy their time with other people's business. The authorities would not be advertising for Peewee through a lawyer. It must be, then, either Lampert or his father that this lawyer represented. Peewee hoped that it was not his father. He was more unwilling to deal with his father than with Lampert. The uneasiness which made him almost sure that it was his father, provoked a dispiriting anxiety. It appeared likely that Beman, knowing who Peewee was and who his father was, would deliver Peewee over to his father.
{{nop}}

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"All right; that's all," Beman asserted.

Peewee backed, anxiously, toward the door. "No; wait!" Beman commanded. "Sit over there." He pressed the bell and waited for the servant. When the man appeared he gave him some instructions which Peewee could not hear and then looked at his watch. These signs seemed to indicate that Beman was expecting someone.

Peewee, from the chair to which he had been assigned, watched the old man apprehensively. Who was he expecting? Minutes passed.

Presently the doorbell rang. The servant crossed the hall; the outer door opened and closed. The servant appeared at the door of the library, evidently in accordance with the instruction she had received, and stood aside to let the visitor enter.

Peewee, seeing behind the servant the man whose picture he had looked at in the room upstairs, sidled off his chair in preparation for either flight or battle. The man's likeness to himself was more evident in his person than it had been merely in the picture. Peewee's throat

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closed up, but he recollected that he had told Beman that he did not know his father.

"Come in, Markyn," Beman invited.

Markyn stood looking from the door and not yet seeing Peewee.

"I'd like to know why you sent for me," he began.

When he had got as far as this, he suddenly perceived Peewee. His gaze quickened with surprise, then inquiry. His lips set to a straight line; he whitened and then flushed suddenly and angrily.

"Got a little guest here," Beman explained. "Name H. Seabury." He did not smile; his mouth and eyes had an unpleasant expression.

"Come here, boy," he directed. Peewee in spite of his determination to refuse, went to him.

"This is Mr. Walter Markyn," Beman observed. He was watching Markyn, not Peewee. "Shake hands with him."

Peewee, keeping carefully in mind that he had told Beman that he did not know his father, put out his hand. Walter Markyn turned pale and did not take it.
{{nop}}

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"Suit yourself," Beman remarked. Then he looked to the servant. "All right; take the boy away," he directed. "See that he stays upstairs."

Peewee, staring at them determinedly over his shoulder, went to the servant, who led him into the hall and to the stairs.

"You heard what he said," the servant instructed him. "You're to stay upstairs."

"Yes, sir."

He went upstairs while the servant stood watching him. His worst apprehensions, he perceived, had been confirmed. Beman, wanting to protect his granddaughter, was going to turn Peewee over to his father, and they were consulting in the library as to the best way of getting rid of him.

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When Peewee got to the top of the stairs, he turned and looked down. All that he saw was the disappearing back of the servant. He waited. After he could no longer hear the servant's steps, he went part way down the stairs and listened. Not hearing anything, he went on all the way down. The library door had been closed. He put his ear against it and then could hear Beman's voice, high pitched and angry.

"She might have known something would happen if she trusted you!"

Peewee stiffened with surprise. Beman and his father were not then, in agreement. Beman was not merely turning Peewee over to his father. What was he doing? Someone, Peewee knew, would discover him if he stopped to listen

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outside the door of the library, but there was a room next to the library into which probably no one would come. Peewee darted into that room. Here, too, the door into the library was closed, and he went to it and lay down close to it on the floor.

"Go back further," he heard Beman saying. "Go clear back—back to the wedding."

"It goes still further back than that."

"Very well; but wasn't I right? The little fool was bound to marry you? Now the thing works out! I couldn't tell where Jeff Markyn's grandson would go wrong, but I knew he wouldn't go straight.

"No. You merely hated my family. It isn't the man who's injured that never forgives; it's the one who inflicts the injury."

Peewee grew tense with perplexity. What was the meaning of this talk? His father said something which Peewee could not hear.

"She came here,"—this was Beman speaking now—"several days in succession and sat by my front window where she could look out. She was watching, I discovered, for a boy she'd

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taken an interest in. She'd seen him on the beach here nearly every day. I got it out of her she meant to find a home for him—not in your house, not in any institution. The thing looked queer to me, and I said, 'Bring the boy here; I'm all alone in this big house and it'll be good for me.' She wouldn't consent at first; finally she agreed to it."

"Because you made her think that she could trust you. We all believed you'd buried that old family feud the way we had."

"Not with you, I hadn't. You married my granddaughter in spite of me; the boys on the Board could have told you to watch out."

Peewee's heart beat fast. He recollected the questions that Beman had asked him. Beman, it was beginning to appear, had already known the answer to those questions. Why then had he asked them? Was it to find out how much Peewee knew? Peewee had denied any knowledge of his father. So Beman had showed him to his father and at once sent him away. Why?

Beman's voice was again going on: "She

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brought the boy here and by hek! he looked as much like you as two peas. What lawyer would you go to, I wondered, if you were in trouble? You'd go, I had no doubt at all to Sallet. I put a man to dig in Sallet's office. Sallet, he found, was advertising for a boy. In twenty-four hours I had the whole blamed thing. I had the boy's record in the institutions; I had the mother's name. Like to hear it? I had her looked up too. I was almost sure what all this meant. I sent for you to come over here, and I watched you when you saw the boy. That made me certain. You're no fit husband for Matt Beman's granddaughter—coming to her straight from another woman, and with a child running the streets who doesn't know his father!"

"I never knew there was a boy."

"What does your knowing matter?"

Peewee heard his father's voice after a long interval. "What is it that you mean to do?"

"I'm going to take her back—away from you. This house is lonesome. I'm old, I ain't dead yet. I'd like a young woman—my grand-

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daughter—around as well as anybody would."

Peewee thrilled delightedly. Beman was not going to give him over to his father; he was going to bring Mrs. Markyn here. It was not wholly plain how Beman was going to accomplish this, but the old man's power was certain. Peewee would see Mrs. Markyn daily; they might possibly eat their meals together; she would come perhaps to kiss him good-night.

"You've considered the effect of this, of course?" This was his father.

"You mean the scandal? It ain't necessary there should be any scandal. I don't mind gossip by people who don't know what they're talking about."

"No; I mean the effect of this on her."

"Of course I have. I'll get my effect. She wouldn't believe any story against you merely by itself, and you've made her trust you so that the boy, without the story, isn't enough to make her suspect you. But she'll have to believe the two together, and by the Lord! I've got 'em both, and she'll believe because you won't be able to deny."
{{nop}}

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Peewee chilled. The way Mrs. Markyn was to be brought here, then, was by telling her all about himself. He was no longer so sure what this implied. He had thought when he had been feeling certain that she suspected his relation to his father, that she was not made so unhappy by it as he had expected her to be. He had not been able to understand that. Now Beman said plainly that she did not yet suspect. If that was so, why had she brought him here? But he felt that Beman knew. Again therefore he himself was unable to comprehend.

"You don't understand," he heard his father say. "Marion still has perfect faith in me. We'd sworn that faith to one another; she asked me if I'd kept it, and I—God knows I couldn't tell her about this; I'd never loved anyone but her. I lied to her!"

"Of course, Jeff's grandson would."

"She built her happiness about that lie. If I—I beg you to reconsider this; I'm not thinking of myself. I'm thinking about her."

Peewee shivered at the pain in his father's voice; its tone more than the words themselves

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resolved his doubts. There was no doubt of Mrs. Markyn's unhappiness if she knew about him; she would grieve inexpressibly. Her desolation, her agony, were in his father's voice.

He drew swiftly back from the door. A servant had gone into the room opposite and switched on the light. Peewee had not noticed that it had grown dusk; the servant would come to this room next perhaps. He darted across the hall to Beman's den.

He sat there miserably. It was clear what was going on now in the library, although he could no longer hear even the voices. His father was begging Beman to change his intention. Would he succeed in doing that? Peewee had the feeling that his father was not the kind of person who could change any determination of that obstinate old man.

He had a sense of amazement of what was happening to his father. A man did something wrong; afterward apparently everything and everybody conspired to punish him. It was not perfectly clear to Peewee exactly what wrong his father had done with regard to Helen Lam-

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pert, but there was no doubt at all of the combination of forces which were taking vengeance for it. Lampert had learned of it, and had probably made his father give him money; Beman had heard of it and was going to take his wife away from him. Mrs. Markyn had said that a boy who was tempted to do anything wrong ought to think first how it would make his mother feel. It appeared clear that his father in the matter of Helen Lampert had not thought enough of how it would make his mother feel; if he had he would not have been in these difficulties.

The door of the library opened and his father passed through the hall. He stumbled a little, as though his gaze fixed itself upon objects without actually seeing them. Beman came from the library and crossed to his den. He saw Peewee and smiled with satisfaction.

"What a man must do, boy," he said triumphantly, "is wait. Sometime his time will come."

"Yes, sir," said Peewee unhappily.

The old man's victorious manner made plain

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what the result of the interview had been; his father had not been able to change Beman. Beman apparently had forgotten that he had told Peewee to stay upstairs; but he might remember it. Peewee moved out into the hall and went slowly up to his room.

He choked at the room's look of comfort. What was it Beman had said, "She'll believe because, by the Lord! I've got both the story and the boy." He perceived, as he stood in the room, the boy in the mirror standing in the reflected room in his new clothes.

They called the clothes his as they called the room, but both he realized, belonged to Beman. He went suddenly to the drawer into which the servant had tumbled his old clothes, and choked again as he saw that the clothes still were there. Then he began to take off his new clothes.

He folded his coat and shirt carefully and put them on a chair; then his knickerbockers. He unfastened his shoes; then he hesitated, and refastened them. He looked a long time at them, but finally he took off the shoes and stockings. He put on his old clothes which had been damp

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when they were tossed into the drawer and now smelled mouldy and dirty. His eyes filled with tears as he looked about the room, and he felt blindly for the door, and blinked the tears away and looked out. The hall was empty, and he went noiselessly down the stairs, but stopped half way. A servant passed below him without noticing him, and he heard Beman's voice speaking to the servant.

He stopped still and considered. There was something aggressively forceful in Beman's voice even when he spoke of ordinary things. He had been intending to run away from Beman, but the old man's tone made suddenly plain to him the futility of that. He had run away a dozen times from a dozen different institutions. They had always caught him, although they had had no more reason for searching for him than the mere routine transaction of their business. They would, he had learned fully, always catch him in the end. Beman, who had more reason for catching him than the authorities had, and who could use their agents besides others of his own, would catch him too if he was

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upon the streets; and he had, he realized, no place except the streets to go.

He went on down the stairs, anxiously contemplating these possibilities. He opened the great front door, went out, noiselessly reclosed it, and ran down the steps. He went north till he had counted four blocks, then, very slowly, west. The great, square house he was approaching was his father's. He had decided what to do. He would tell his father that he had overheard what had been said to him by Beman, and had run away in the hope that this would prevent Beman from telling Mrs. Markyn. That Peewee did not want Mrs. Markyn to be told might establish an understanding between them and soften his father.

On her account he did not dare to go to the house but sat down across the street from it, where eventually he might see his father going in or coming out. He perceived at the end of the street, where it merged into the park, a figure passing and repassing under a street lamp as though absorbed in troubled thought, but he did not at first recognize it as his father. When

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he did, he started up and went hesitatingly toward him. As he continued to tell himself fiercely that he was not afraid of his father, he did not know why each step as he approached was slower than the last, and why his flesh was cold. His father's look—hands clenched, eyes fixed on the ground, turning back automatically at each end of his short walk as though he did not know that he was doing it—increased these peculiar feelings. He did not doubt that his father was considering what he would like to do to him.

He had got close to him, but his father did not notice him. Twice, in his absorption, his father almost brushed him. Peewee tried to speak but could not. Desperately, he stepped in his father's way, but his father merely moved to go around this obstruction. Peewee perceived that in his old clothes and in the dark his father did not recognize him as the boy he had seen at Beman's.

"Well," his father demanded, "what is it that you want?"

Peewee could not reply. By repeating to

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himself from running away. His father started to push him out of his path.

"I'm the boy," Peewee croaked.

He saw his father stiffen and stare down at him, then swiftly bend. He felt him seize him and twist him about so that the street lamp lighted his face. Markyn raised his head and looked up and down the street to see who had come with him. Peewee waited, his eyes closed, his body weak with his not understandable feelings resting against his father's arm.

Dry sounds, whose meaning he could not determine, came from his father's throat.

"I ran away from him," Peewee started to explain.

He was not able however to say anything more, for Markyn in his excitement at getting possession of the boy, appeared to think of nothing else. He breathed deeply. Suddenly he clutched Peewee's hand and began to hurry him along the street.

Peewee had difficulty in making his legs obey instructions.

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For the time being, none of the things which Peewee had been indefinitely expecting happened. His father did not throw him into the lake and watch him drown; he did not lead him into the darkness of the park bushes and murder him. Keeping tight hold of Peewee's hand, as though not assured that the boy would not try to escape him, he led him to Clark Street, where they waited for a street car.

Peewee's imagination suggested to him that his fate was probably deferred. His attention was taken up in assuring himself that the prospect of it did not frighten him, and he stared angrily, awaiting the chance to make his explanation. There appeared no opportunity for doing this. The street car, which was safer for persons who wished to escape inquiry who might

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be inquired about, than a cab would be, assured him of temporary immunity. Nothing would be done to him upon the car in the presence of other passengers.

They descended from the car a mile from where they had taken it and stopped in a drug-store while his father telephoned. The globed lights of the park, as they came out from the drug store, were visible in the darkness which blotted the end of the street. They turned, Peewee noted with feelings of terror, in that direction. Was this some deserted portion of the park where the body of a small boy could be disposed of with impunity? It was undoubtedly time to try the effect of an explanation on his father, but he was prevented from this by their stopping at a house half way down the street, and by his father's ringing the bell.

A tall, yellow-skinned, dry-looking man who opened the door, evidently had been expecting their arrival; it was to him, Peewee thought, his father must have telephoned, for he inspected Peewee with interest but without surprise.

"Where did you find him?" he inquired.
{{nop}}

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"He was at Matt Beman's. He ran away from there and I met him on the street."

The tall man raised his eyebrows. "At Beman's!"

Peewee could not be certain whether his father was concealing the nature of their meeting, or whether he was unaware of Peewee's part in it. They followed the tall man into a stuffy room, where Peewee was given a chair. He sat watching them determinedly and swinging his short legs while for some minutes the two men talked together inaudibly.

"The shorter time he is here then," the tall man said at last, "the better. I can possibly make arrangements over the long distance 'phone, and there is a train early this evening."

"He can't be taken out there the way he is, Sallet."

"No; certainly. Suppose, while I am making the arrangements, you get an outfit for him. I'll call a cab for you."

"Can it be done without taking him along to fit?"

"Their clothes run, I think, by ages. I

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would suppose a six year old would be about right."

Peewee breathed deeply with the realization that it did not seem probable they would buy clothes for a boy whose body they were going to dispose of. He recalled that his father, on first learning of his existence, had spoken only of sending him away. He felt now that, if it would help Mrs. Markyn, he would be willing to be sent away. Wherever he might be sent he would save his money, as Beman had saved his.

Subsequently, grown up and no longer afraid of what people could do to him, he would return, very wealthy, and see Mrs. Markyn.

He heard his father leave the house, and later heard Sallet at the telephone, but could not make out what he said. He planned, while they waited for his father to come back, the particulars of his return in later years to see Mrs. Markyn—himself as good-looking as his father, as forceful as Beman, a person in elegantly fitting clothes, topped with a silk hat, and riding in a brilliant limousine. His father

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brought back a number of bundles and a little wicker suitcase. The smallness of the suitcase excited Peewee; it seemed to indicate that the case was intended for himself, and he had never so far in life owned any baggage. The bundles contained underwear and a suit of clothes.

"Put these on," his father commanded.

Sallet and his father stood watching as Peewee stripped himself of his old garments and put on the new clothes.

"I kept the cab," his father said to Sallet. "I suppose you made inquiries about the trains."

"There is one."

The lawyer brought his hat and coat. His father, when they were ready to start, stood gazing down at the boy and Peewee gazed back at him. There was no tenderness in Markyn's look.

"I suppose you're wondering what all this means," he inquired.

Peewee recalled that his father did not know that he knew that he was his son.

"Yes, sir," he said.
{{nop}}

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"Mr. Sallet is interested in boys and is going to have you taken care of."

"Yes, sir," Peewee agreed.

"On your part you are to behave yourself. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

Peewee clutched the handle of the small suitcase, as the three went out at the front door and down to the cab. He and Sallet got in. He looked back when the cab had started, but his father already was walking in the opposite direction. He wished he had had the chance to tell his father that he would help him try to keep Mrs. Markyn from knowing about him but the time for that had passed. It was not yet clear what was being done with him, but it was evident that he would not see his father wherever he might be going.

His thought, therefore, faced anxiously forward to the fact that he was going on a train. The only fear which Peewee admitted was an unconquerable fright of locomotives, though he enjoyed the rumble of the elevated above the streets and the clatter of the street cars on the

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surface. He did not know the reason for this fear. If he had been asked he could have replied only that he had "always" been afraid of them. He trembled and stuck close to Sallet as they walked beside the train until they found their car. Then, recalling his resentment at Sallet, he drew away from him and looked up at him steadily. When the small suitcase had been put in the rack above their heads and the train began to move, he could not see into the darkness outside the window except as they passed green and red lights beside the track, or streets with rows of street lamps, or buildings whose windows were lighted rectangles. The yellow-faced lawyer scrutinized him.

"Exactly how was it," Sallet asked, "that Mr. Markyn came across you?"

Peewee was certain that his father had already told the lawyer this. "He said it to you, I think," he answered.

"Yes; but I'd like to hear you 'say' it now. It was on the street, wasn't it?"

Peewee's antagonism toward Sallet was distinctly different from his opposition to Beman.

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Beman was forceful, threatening and only incidentally crafty; Sallet was primarily crafty. Peewee did not define this difference in words, but he recognized that his experience of reading faces on the street did not serve him here. He could not tell by watching the lawyer what Sallet was thinking about.

"He'd seen you at Beman's?"

"Yes, sir."

"So of course he recognized you."

"Yes, sir," Peewee replied relievedly.

"In the dark," the lawyer said in a perfectly natural tone.

Peewee stiffened; the relief he had experienced was plainly a delusion.

"Markyn said he found you on the street," Sallet went on. "Then he said you spoke to him. That isn't actually the point. You meet a comparatively strange man on the street; he brings you to me; we decree between us that you're to be taken away, you don't know where. The actual point is this; why haven't you made any objection?"

Peewee stared at him, unable to reply.
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"You don't know where you're going," the lawyer stated.

"No, sir," Peewee agreed.

"Do you want to go there?"

Peewee shook his head.

"All right then; why do you go?" the lawyer asked.

Peewee eyed him in doubt. The lawyer, it was evident, was demanding the explanation which Peewee had wanted to make to his father.

"He was going to tell her," he replied at last.

"He? Who was?"

"Mr. Beman."

"Whom was he going to tell?"

Peewee hesitated. He never spoke of Mrs. Markyn by name and even in his thoughts she was always merely "she."

"His wife," he said.

It was evident that the lawyer did not understand this.

"Beeman hasn't any wife," he said. "What was he going to tell her?"

"About him and me."

The lawyer considered these perplexing pro-

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nouns carefully, and studied Peewee with sudden interest.

"Let's understand this," he observed. "Beman was going to tell Mrs. Markyn something. Is that it?"

"Yes, sir."

"What was he going to tell her?"

"About him and me," Peewee repeated.

The lawyer's expression changed to one of sharp surprise; he had not, of course, Peewee appreciated, known any more than Markyn knew.

"So you ran away from Beman?"

"Yes."

"To Markyn?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"He didn't want her told."

Sallett gazed at Peewee sternly, while he reflected upon this. "I see," he said finally.

Peewee could not tell what the effect of this information had been upon the lawyer. It was plain that it had had a considerable effect, but it had not softened Sallet's manner; rather, he

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appeared more stern. In spite of his opposition to the lawyer and his anxiety at being on a train, Peewee was very sleepy. At intervals his eyes closed unconsciously. When they had done this, a sense of something indefinite but strongly terrifying came to him. It was not connected with Sallet or with his father; they, in fact, disappeared from his consciousness. It was connected vaguely with the clicking of the car wheels on the track and the swaying and rumbling of the car. It was like a dream, but it did not have the definiteness even of a dream, and it awoke him with a start of terror. Each time this happened he saw the lawyer still sternly studying him. Finally his eyes failed to open and he slept.

Peewee awoke in the dim grayness of early dawn. It was so dark that it conveyed the impression that it still was night. His first consciousness that he was without his clothes was followed by the realization that he was in a large, soft bed. What little light there was came through a small square window, and above him there was a sloping, raftered roof.
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He got up and went to the window to look out. A dim, brown field, from which a mist was rising, sloped away from the window; at its further edge there was a narrow strip of woods, beyond, and seen over the top of the trees, there was a hill. Nowhere was there any other house in sight. Peewee shuddered and looked about him for his clothes. They were arranged neatly on a chair. He put them on, did not notice until he had dressed himself in his underclothes that the new suit which he had worn the night before was not among them. It had been replaced by a small suit of overalls. The resemblance of these to those worn by workmen—"city-builders" of the practical kind—pleased him; but the undefined change in his circumstances which they implied made him anxious. After looking vainly about again for his other clothes he put them on.

He opened the door cautiously and looked out into a small dark hall. The hall led him to a narrow, crooked flight of stairs, the stairs to a lower hall, at one end of which a door stood open into a kitchen where a stout, red-haired woman

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was cooking by lamplight. He looked in at her without her seeing him, then went to the door at the other end of the hall and opened it. This let him out onto a small wooden porch. He observed now, at the side of the house not visible from his window, a barn and outbuildings. A tall, thin man in overalls and cowhide shoes came out of the barn with a measure of grain in his hand and went into a shed. A sound remotely resembling an auto-horn came to him, and looking in that direction he perceived an animal with horns and a smaller one without any, which some internal conviction told him were a cow and a calf. He heard another sound like that of a large crowd of people talking all together at a great distance and hurried around the corner of the house to discover whence it came and found that it was made by chickens.

Brown or green fields sloped in all directions away from the small, wooden house. No other house could be seen from it, and no one in sight. Peewee went to the door of the shed which the thin man had entered and looked in. The shed, it developed, held some other cows.

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The man sat on a stool beside one, shooting a stream of milk from beneath the cow into a tin pail. Peewee recoiled toward the house. He had been aware, by theory, that milk came from cows, but he had not seen the process in opera tion before and the sight revolted him.

The man emerged presently from the shed, and set his milk pail down and crossed to a small garden. Here he pulled out of the ground certain small red objects which experience of South Water Street informed Peewee were radishes. The man struck the radishes against the palm of his hand to shake the earth off them. A feeling of unhappiness came to Peewee, and he went back into the house and into the kitchen where the red-haired woman was at work.

"Where's Mr. Sallet?" he inquired.

"He went back last night after leaving you here. Say good morning the first time you see anybody," the woman directed without looking at him.

"Yes, ma'am," Peewee agreed.

The thin man came in at the kitchen door and put his milk pail and the radishes down on a

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bench, and began to wash his hands at the sink.

"Breakfast in a minute, father," the woman observed.

Peewee reflected upon the form of this address. It was not possible that the thin man was the woman's father. "Father," in this instance, must be the correct formality in addressing him.

"Hello," the man remarked, looking at Peewee.

"Good morning, father," Peewee replied.

"You mustn't call him 'father,{{' "}} the woman rebuked him. "Call him Mr. Miller. And I'm Mrs. Miller."

"Yes, Mrs. Miller," Peewee assented.

The woman poured some of the fresh milk into a glass and put it on the table.

"Set up," she directed. Peewee stared at her, perplexed by this admonition which seemed to be addressed to himself. "Set up to the table," the woman repeated crossly.

Peewee drew himself upon the chair to which she pointed and tasted of the milk. It was still warm, and he pushed it away from him, repelled by recollection of the cow. He looked at

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the radishes which had been washed and put upon the table. There were potatoes also, and the realization came suddenly to him that these too had been taken from the ground. In happier days he had picked such things up from the gutters of South Water Street without repugnance, but they had had then behind them a history of cleanly barrels or crates.

He choked, and his feeling of unhappiness increased into the sense of an immense calamity.

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Very clean as to his hands and face, and dressed in the clothes his father had bought in Chicago, Peewee sat on the haircloth sofa in the small, formal parlor of the farmhouse. His arrayal in these unaccustomed garments for a week day, and his lonely isolation in the parlor presaged another change in his existence. No indication of the nature of this change had been given him, and the uncertainty filled him with anxiety. He studied at times the brilliantly colored pictures on the parlor walls and the wax flowers under a glass ball on the round table, but for the most part he merely listened. The reason for this was that he had been told not to get off the sofa, and that from it he could not see out at the window. He appreciated that whatever was now about to happen to him would

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be preceeded by some arrival along the road, and in default of sight there would be only sound to warn him of this coming.

He had grown, in the three weeks which he had spent upon the farm, very familiar with the road. It came to him, a dusty track, over the top of the hill, it descended to a level sandy stretch, and in the distance it ascended another hill and vanished. Few vehicles passed along the road; there was occasionally an automobile and a little more frequently a springless farm-wagon. His soul abhorred the farm-yard where the chickens nestled in the dust, but the road gave him a sense of horror. The definite disappearance of its two ends over the hills epitomized his loneliness. By day, he sat against the house wall, concealed by a laburnum bush, and watched for someone to come past on it; by night, when darkness settled on the little farmhouse and no light blinked anywhere in sight, it was the recollection of the empty road which would not let him sleep. It made him think of streets where high buildings stood closely side by side, of pavements thundering with vehicles,

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and of sidewalks crowded with people. He envied happier boys who sold newspapers among those people and listened to what they said to one another.

He stiffened now, as he heard the chug-chug of a motor car on the road. The sound grew louder and then ceased. The car had been stopped, then, at the house. He strained uneasily in his seat as the farmer's wife passed through the hall, and listened for some other voice than hers. Then he braced himself suspiciously, for the voice which came to him was Sallet's.

It was plain that the conjunction of Sallet's arrival and his own dressed-up condition indicated that he was to be taken somewhere else. Why? Had Beman discovered where he was, or Lampert? In that case, Sallet had come to take him somewhere still further from Chicago, and Peewee's imagination shrank in horror from trying to imagine what a place still further from the city would be like.

"Ready, young man?" Sallet inquired, appearing at the door.
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"Yes, sir," Peewee replied guardedly.

"Go out and get into the car."

Peewee halted in the hall to look after Sallet. The lawyer had gone in into the kitchen and was talking with the farmer there and giving him money. As Peewee descended the three steps in front of the house, the large red hen which he detested more than any of the other chickens was throwing dust over her back beside the door-step. He stopped, considering a final vindictive assault upon the hen. The lowness of his spirits prevented this and he went on to the motor. The car, he observed by the tracks in the road, had been turned around in the direction from which it had come, but there was neither additional threat nor any promise in this. He did not dare to ask any questions of the driver, or of Sallet when he came out carrying Peewee's small suitcase.

Peewee had observed that wagons usually were loaded when going in the direction the motor was headed, and empty when they came back. This seemed to predicate something important at the end of the road; it proved, how-

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ever, to end in a small, uninteresting village. They traversed a street flanked on each side by farm wagons and stopped at the railway depot. Having paid the driver, Sallet left Peewee on a settee in the waiting room while he bought the tickets. This meant, Peewee lugubriously decided, that they were going very far indeed. Directions were not known to him, and in his nervousness, when the train finally thundered in, he could not tell the way that it was going. Seated beside Sallet in the car, he looked uneasily out of the window whenever they passed through villages, but looked about the car when there were only fields outside.

At the end of some two hours, it became plain that the villages were getting closer together. After looking at one of them Peewee only had time to take one or sometimes two bites of the sandwich with which Sallet had provided him, before they came to another. They passed presently a wide-spread factory with many little houses grouped about it; then a whole string of factories. He put his sandwich down upon the windowsill and, forgetting it, stared out con-

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tinuously. He trembled as he saw finally a street where children were playing between unbroken rows of red brick houses. Other streets succeeded. They were unquestionably entering some large city. But what city Peewee could not yet tell.

The train rolled slowly into a long, covered train-shed and his recognition of it filled him with nostalgia. He saw, as they descended, a policeman whom he remembered having seen before. He wanted, as they passed through the station, to run away from Sallet out into the streets, but now the lawyer held him firmly by the hand. He shook violently as he was put into a taxicab. The thronging faces of people, the roar of vehicles, the clang of street-car bells and the rumble of the elevated stirred him with delight. He would have been perfectly happy, he thought, if the lawyer had let him get out and sit down on the edge of the sidewalk with his feet in the gutter, but his opinion of Sallet showed him the impossibility of the lawyer's doing that.

The cab stopped before an office building.

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They got out and ascended in an elevator to a corridor where there were several doors marked with Sallet's name. The lawyer unlocked the furthest of these doors and pushed Peewee ahead of him into a small, carpeted private office. Peewee grew tense with resentment as he recognized his father awaiting them within.

"Had there been anyone at the farm?" Markyn asked of Sallet.

"They'd noticed no one."

The question confirmed Peewee's idea that it was most probably Beman who had discovered where he was, and he wondered what more than merely discovering Beman had done.

"Would you mind leaving us alone?" Markyn said to the lawyer.

Sallet went into the next office and closed the door, and Peewee surveyed his father antagonistically. It seemed to him that his father appeared more than usually troubled.

"Sit down."

Peewee drew himself up onto the nearest chair. His father paced up and down in front of him.
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"Did you like it on the farm?" Markyn asked abruptly.

Peewee shook his head.

"But you would have stayed there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why?"

Sallet, Peewee reflected, had undoubtedly told his father of their conversation on the train.

"So she wouldn't find out who I am," he answered.

Markyn was staring queerly down at him. "That's what I understood. You seem to have an appreciation that it's going to be a grief to Mrs. Markyn to learn about you. I don't know how you've come to realize that. I don't know how much more you're capable of understanding. You know a lot of things which you ought not to know, I imagine. The things you ought to know, it's probable, you don't. Have you ever loved anyone?"

"No, sir," Peewee replied indignantly. Love, in his definition of it, was something soft. It connected itself vaguely in his mind with tears, which he considered shameful. He did not give

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any name to what he felt toward Mrs. Markyn.

"I don't know how to approach you," his father said. "You're as incomprehensible to me as, I suppose, I am to you."

What, Peewee wondered, was his father getting at? He drew up a chair and sat down facing Peewee and took both his small hands. He seemed embarassed and uncertain.

"Son, when you saw your mother before she died, did she tell you her name?"

"No, sir," said Peewee.

"You know it, though?"

"Yes, sir. Helen Lampert." There could be, Peewee felt, no object to be gained by not being open with his father. "She changed her names," he offered.

"I know she changed her names. But Helen Lampert was her real one. Did she—," his father hesitated. "Did she speak as though she had ever changed her name the way women usually change their names—by being married?"

The question was a little deep for Peewee. "No," he decided finally.

"Did she tell you she had not been married?"
{{nop}}

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"No, sir."

"Did she say anything about marriage at all?"

"No, sir."

She had not been married. Peewee knew that and knew that his father knew it too. Why was his father asking this?

"When she gave you my name, what did she say to you about me?"

Peewee considered. "She said I wasn't to tell people the name. She said she and I were the only ones who knew that it was you."

"She didn't speak as if she had been married to me?"

"No, sir."

The answer seemed to satisfy his father. "Son," he said, "I think we've come, all of us, to what is called a show-down. Do you know what that means?"

"Yes, sir," said Peewee. He knew the phrases of the streets.

"I've had to send for you to ask you to help me." He drew Peewee's hands together, holding them between his own. "Will you listen to me and try to understand?"
{{nop}}

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Peewee nodded. But he looked at his father with suspicion.

"Your mother had never told me about you; she'd kept that secret from me just as my name had been kept from you. She'd kept it from all others, too. Her own family, her father, did not know. But her father, Ben Lampert, long before had known about her and me. He put together what he'd known before and what he had just learned and made me give him money to keep him from telling Mrs. Markyn. He came several times and each time I gave him money, but not, he thought, enough. I couldn't give him all he asked. So finally I stopped."

Peewee understood about this blackmail. Wasn't it Beman, then, who had made this present trouble? It appeared to have been Peewee's grandfather, Ben Lampert, who had done it.

"Now Lampert has done something else," his father continued. "A shyster lawyer came to me two days ago and told me that, unless I give them more money than I possibly can give, they're going to bring suit in court to prove that

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you're legitimate. Do you know what that means?"

"No, sir," said Peewee.

"They claim your mother and I were married. They say Lampert found evidence of that among the things left by your mother in her trunk."

Peewee felt inconsequential interest in the trunk. He recalled it, and the strong perfume that came from it, and the disordered, gorgeous, spotted dresses it had contained.

"Do you understand? Whatever they have by which to try to prove that that was so they have made up by themselves. But I shall have to show it is untrue in court, where it all will be public. To give them more money is only to put all this off. Sooner or later I shall have to stop, and they will do it then."

"Tell her," Peewee offered, "that what they say isn't true."

"I'm afraid it will do no good to tell her that. Whatever else they may fail to prove in court, they can at least prove that you are my son."

Peewee reflected. Something that Beman

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once said to him recurred to him. "If a boy does you dirt," Beman had advised, "hit him in the eye."

"Why don't you do something to Lampert?" he suggested.

"There's nothing effective I can do to Lampert. Son, I have decided that the time has come when I must tell Mrs. Markyn about you. If she must know, I would rather she learned it all from me.

"After I have told her, I want her to see you. It may make it more possible for her to forgive me."

Peewee stared upward at him, startled. So this was why he had been brought here!

"Are you going to tell her now?" he asked uneasily.

"Not to-night. To-morrow will be the time, I think. Sallet will take care of you until I need you. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, sir."

His father gazed down at him a moment as

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if to assure himself of Peewee's comprehension, then went to the door and called the lawyer. They talked inaudibly together and went out. Sallet came back.

"You'll have to wait here a little while," he said. "Then I'll look after you."

He closed the door on Peewee and the boy sat staring gloomily. He was not directly thinking about what his father had said. He was thinking about Mrs. Markyn. When he saw her again his father would have told her all about him. He did not hope, as his father seemed to hope, that her liking for himself would make her forgive them both. People, he thought, did not forgive other people who had destroyed their happiness. Whatever her feelings toward his father might become, she would have only hate for himself. He remembered how, the last time he had seen her, she had talked long and kindly with him; she had put her cool, slim fingers against his cheek; finally moved by his friendliness, she impulsively kissed him. She would never now do that again. He regretted that he had let them send him to the farm. If he had

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not done that he might have seen her on those days. He wished that he could see her once more before she hated him.

The day was pleasant and it was three o'clock in the afternoon. On pleasant days he had seen her often between three and four walking upon the esplanade besides the children's bathing beach. Would she walk there to-day? The desire to see her once more before she knew was overwhelming in him.

He got up, shaking excitedly, and examined the lock upon the door. He went to the other door and listened and heard Sallet speaking to a clerk. He sped noiselessly back to the first door, turned the knob of the spring lock and darted out into the corridor. The elevator by which he had ascended with Sallet was in the front. There was, he perceived, a stairway in the rear. He tumbled breathlessly down four flights of stairs into a hallway at one end of which he saw a door that opened on the alley. He rushed out and ran down the alley across Dearborn Street to State and then turned north. The street was crowded; boys were

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selling papers. He observed with satisfaction the mud which had splashed his Sunday shoes.

When he had reached the river he stopped for several minutes in deep thought, but reconsidered the idea which had come to him. First he would see Mrs. Markyn. When he had done that, it would be time to do the other things he had been thinking of. Had some other boy taken the post upon the street where he had sold his papers? If that was so, he would find great satisfaction in taking summary revenge upon him—provided always that the boy did not prove too big. There was an alley where the boys pitched pennies which he would then revisit, and he would call on the old woman in whose cellar he formerly had slept.

Meanwhile, he had crossed the bridge, and at Chicago Avenue the curved esplanade of the Lake Shore Drive appeared before him. He halted, studying nervously Beman's huge stone house, with its driveway and garages on his left. Beman did not often leave his house or look out of its windows, but one of his many servants might be looking out and recognize Peewee.

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He retraced his steps to the first cross street, went west to Astor, walked north a block past Beman's house and returned to the drive. There he sat down to wait upon the breakwater.

It was almost certain Mrs. Markyn would take her walk upon such a sunny day.

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The limousine had swung into the drive several blocks to the north of him and Peewee could not be sure at that distance if it was her's. It stopped at the edge of the greensward, still too far away for certainty as to the car, but there was no mistaking her slim figure. His heart leaped as he saw her cross to the esplanade and he trembled as she turned in the direction which would lead her past him.

Her start of surprise and eagerness as she saw him was a warning to him.

"Oh! you have come back!" She said. "I'm glad."

He smiled at her with careful innocence. "Yes'm," he said.

"You didn't keep your promise. You didn't stay with Mr. Beman. You ran away."
{{nop}}

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"Yes'm; I did."

"Why?" She sat down beside him on the concrete step. "Please tell me why you didn't stay there."

Should he pretend to her it had been from fear of Beman? Should he tell her something else? Her nearness had its effect of bewilderment upon him. She had on a dress he had not seen before; he thought it prettier than the others. Her dark hair was looped under a close round hat. The faint, sweet odor of her presence, as he breathed it, made him fight against an incomprehensible impulse toward tears.

"I didn't like it there," he replied.

"Why?"

"I just didn't like it."

She looked wonderingly at him. "You mean to say you ran away from where you would have had good food and clothes and someone to look after you just back to the streets?"

"Yes'm."

"You're like a little wild thing," she observed. "I can't understand you. Don't you

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know that someday you'll grow up and that you ought to have the things now that will make you then a strong, good man?"

"Yes'm," he said.

She would never be like this again to him, he was thinking. When he saw her again his father would have told her. There would not be that kind interest in her clear blue eyes, that sweetness in her smile.

"You wouldn't want me to take you back there again?"

"No'm."

"You understand that I want to do something for you—help you?"

"Yes'm."

"If I found some other place, some nicer place where you would like to be and where they would take care of you, would you let me send you there?"

He pretended to consider; there was no harm in promising.

"Yes'm."

"Will you go with me now?"

He drew away from her apprehensively.
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"No'm."

"Will you let me give you a note to someone who will feed you and take care of you {{SIC|to-night?}}

He shook his head violently.

"Then what can I do? Will you meet me here to-morrow?"

He wanted to cry. To-morrow she would not want to meet him; to-morrow she would think of him with bitterness and dislike. "Yes'm," he said.

"You'll surely come here?"

"Yes."

"I wouldn't let you go away—I'd take you with me now, only I don't want to make you not like me; I don't want to frighten you." She got up, holding out a five dollar bill to him. "Be sure you have a place to eat and sleep to-night."

He put the money in his pocket, standing up because she had. He hung his head and put one foot upon the other in embarrassment; he wanted her to kiss him and did not know how to ask. She reacted unconsciously to his desire.
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"We'll bind our bargain then," she said, "like this."

He trembled violently as he felt her lips, and stood looking after her as she crossed the greensward and bridle path to the waiting motor. She hesitated and turned back a step as though doubtful of her decision not to force him to go with her, but finally got into the car.

The loneliness which choked him as the motor disappeared changed slowly to resentment. That she was never going to be like this to him again was because of Lampert. He had no feeling toward his grandfather except dislike and scorn. It made him angry that his father had not tried harder to stop Lampert. Instead of that his father had let Lampert frighten him by saying that he was going into court. As he looked toward the great house just down the street, he thought that the fierce, self-willed, violent old man who lived in it would not have been afraid of Lampert. If it had been Beman whom Lampert had been dealing with, Lampert would have been stopped. Beman, in spite of his age, had given

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Peewee an impression of irresistibleness. Peewee worshipped strength, for the streets had taught him that boys who let other boys frighten them never sold their papers.

He went west toward Clark Street, because there were more people on that street than these others, projecting in his mind his plans for revisiting dirtier and more dismal and still more crowded streets, but the thought of Beman persisted and slowed his steps. He had been disturbed by Beman only because Beman had been going to tell Mrs. Markyn about him. Now that Mrs. Markyn was to be told anyway there was no longer any reason for considering Beman that way. What, he wondered, would Beman do, if he knew what Lampert was preparing?

He turned back finally to Astor Street and walked south. He dodged through a narrow passage between two buildings and came out in the rear of Beman's house. The servant's entrance door opening upon the paved court was, he knew, usually unlocked. He pushed at it and crept into the servants' hall, letting the

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door reclose noiselessly. Listening and hearing nothing, he went up the stairs to the great, beautiful main hall. He listened again, then crossed the polished floor without a sound and looked in at the door of Beman's den. The old man was there, sitting in front of his wood fire—immense and powerful even in repose. Peewee coughed and Beman then looked up.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," Peewee returned.

Beman, he saw, looked past him toward the door. The old man had had agents searching for him and supposed that one of them had brought him there. When he saw no one with him his sharp eyes rested on Peewee more attentively.

"Who brought you back?" he asked.

"I just came," Peewee answered sweetly. "I like it here."

Beman swung around in his chair to study Peewee. "You were here before," he said. "You didn't seem to like it then; you ran away."

"Yes, sir."

"Why did you do that?"
{{nop}}

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Beman, Peewee reflected, did not know that he knew who his father was. He had to be told now, for nothing could be accomplished without it.

"I ran away because you were going to show me to her and tell her who I am."

Beman seemed surprised as much as an old man can be surprised.

"I listened at the door," Peewee explained, "and heard you say that to him—that you were going to tell her."

Beman seemed to comprehend. "I see," he said. He thought a moment. "Don't happen to have learned yet who your father is, have you?"

He wanted to discover, Peewee comprehended, how much had been overheard, and was concealing his real question under the indirectness of this inquiry.

"I knew that all along," Peewee answered with sweetness.

Beman seemed amazed and appeared to have gained a sudden respect for Peewee as, though he recognized that Peewee was deeper than he

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looked. The heavy brows came down over his cold, gray eyes. "You did?" he said.

"Yes, sir. I ran away because I didn't want her to be told, but now I don't care if you tell her because she's going to be told anyway."

"What's this?" Beman demanded. "Who's going to tell her?"

Peewee considered his reply to this. "My grandfather is going to make my father tell her."

"Make him?" Beman exclaimed.

"Yes, sir."

"How?"

"He's going to show in court that he was married to my mother." Courts were places well known to Peewee; he swung one leg to and fro and smiled at Beman. "They say they found what shows in her trunk."

"Found what?"

"I don't know. It shows that he was married to her."

"A marriage certificate?"

"I don't know. My father says they made it up themselves."
{{nop}}

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"Forged it? It must be some sort of a certificate then."

The facts of life, though not the names that many of them were called by, were known to Peewee. The circles he had lived in were those where people broke the laws. He had known of men who married several wives without formalities of divorce; it had been very plain that, in such a case, the first wife was respected and the others regarded as unfortunate. Would Beman, it had suddenly occurred to him upon the street, allow his granddaughter to be threatened publicly with that kind of misfortune? Beman had wanted to separate Markyn from his wife, but he had not been willing there should be a scandal. Lampert was preparing scandal. Peewee had not consciously weighed these things, but he had felt that if Beman knew what was going on he would not like it.

He saw with satisfaction Beman get up onto his stiff old legs and move irritably about the room. He looked bigger and more threatening standing up than in his chair. The gray skin of his face whitened and his voice was angry.
{{nop}}

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"Who started this?"

"I said my grandfather."

"Ben Lampert? There's someone helping him. Who?"

"He's got a lawyer."

"What's the lawyer's name?"

Peewee shook his head; his father had not told him that.

"My father said he was going to tell her to-morrow," Peewee remarked.

"He is? What business has he got to tell her? She's my granddaughter, ain't she? If anybody's to tell her, I'm to tell her—not him, or Lampert. What's he going to tell her? How much?"

Peewee surveyed Beman with astonishment. It was quite plain that there was but one thing which anyone would have to tell Mrs. Markyn; when she knew who Peewee was she would know all. Did Beman mean that there were still other things to know about Peewee? The boy did not know why the old man's manner brought this thought to him. But he was aware that there had been a change in Beman—a

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change not produced by what Peewee just had told him. When he had seen Beman last the old man had looked triumphant. He did not look that way now; he looked irritated and bothered.

Beman pressed the bell. "Take him away," he directed when the servant came. "Keep an eye on him this time." He gazed down thoughtfully at Peewee. "It's a dam good thing," he commenced, "that you came back."

Peewee, as the servant led him from the room, twisted his head to gaze back questioningly at the old man. He could not have told why he had expected his father to do nothing against Lampert and had been hopeful of result from Beman. The sidewalks which, since babyhood, had poured their crowds past him had taught him to judge men instinctively, and he had felt, without being able to make it definite in thought, that his father could fight only with his own weapons, while Beman by preference used the weapons of his opponent and was honest with honest men, crooked with crooks. He had not known what he anticipated from

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Beman, but it was certain that what he saw in the old man was not what he had anticipated.

The admonition to the servant to keep watch of him did not disturb him. A boy who had escaped from so many institutions and climbed over so many walls which had broken glass on top would have no difficulty in getting out of Beman's house when he wanted to, in spite of the servants. But in his interest in what the change in Beman meant he did not want to get out of the house yet. The manner of the servants with whom he dined told him nothing. He appreciated that they were not likely to know that anything was going on. He spent the night in the bed he had had when he was in the house before, and awoke with excitement which increased as the day progressed. In the late afternoon, the servant who had charge of him was told to take him to Beman in his den.

"Come here," the old man directed when the servant had left them.

Peewee went near him doubtfully. Beman turned him so that he faced the light and studied speculatively his small face, with its

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distinctive, handsome nose and mouth and violet eyes shaded by their long black lashes.

"How do you like being related to people?" he inquired.

Peewee hesitated. He had been perfectly contented on the streets before he had learned who his parents were. Mostly misfortune had come to him from that discovery; but he recollected that except for it he would not have met Mrs. Markyn.

"Who?" he inquired.

"Well, Ben Lampert—he's your grandfather, ain't he?"

"Yes, sir."

"What do you think of him?"

Peewee violently shook his head. He did not at once find the words to express his intense dislike for the ex-barn boss.

"How about Walter Markyn?"

Peewee did not know; he felt antagonism without resentment toward his father.

"You look like him, you know."

"Yes, sir," Peewee replied.
{{nop}}

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"There's no mistaking that. Are you glad that you're his son?"

"No, sir," said Peewee.

"You mean because he wasn't married to your mother?"

"No, sir." The fact that his birth was not conventional was not a conscious burden to Peewee. He was accustomed to thinking of himself as not like others.

"What then? You'd be glad if he had been married to her, wouldn't you?"

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

Peewee could not answer that. He had an indefinite feeling that it would be an additional misfortune to everybody, including himself, if his father had been married to his mother.

"Who told you that he wasn't married to her?" Beman inquired.

"He did."

"He'd have said that anyway, wouldn't he?"

Did Beman mean that they had been married? Peewee was commencing to believe that the old man did mean that. He perceived

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vaguely that the misfortune which this would entail related to Mrs. Markyn. Would not that make his own position toward her immensely worse. Exactly why his existence should become for that reason more utterly unforgivable to her was not plain to him, but he felt that it was a fact, and his throat closed up as he gazed at Beman anxiously.

"Go over there," Beman directed, "and sit down."

Peewee backed toward the chair and drew himself up on it, still staring at Beman in anxiety.

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The peculiar understanding of one another which existed between the hard old operator and the boy made Peewee appreciate that Beman was anxious. The old man sat silent, watching the clock. When the long hand had traveled nearly all its way round, his great head with its shock of snow-white hair sunk toward his chest as if in disappointment. He straightened suddenly and listened as the doorbell rang. A servant appeared in the door and Beman nodded to him with relief. The servant retired, and Peewee stiffened as the big form of his grandfather appeared in the doorway. The man who followed Lampert was small, dapper, completely bald, with a crafty, hawk-like face. He was, Peewee understood, the lawyer.

Did Beman intend Peewee to remain? He

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had not sent him away. As Lampert, perceiving him, fixed his gaze upon him, the boy hitched away from him nervously and stared at him angrily.

His grandfather, since Peewee had seen him, had taken on still more the look of a man who would not work. He appeared, Peewee saw uneasily, triumphant.

"This is an unfortunate business, gentlemen," Beman remarked.

"Unpleasant, Mr. Beman—unpleasant on all sides," the lawyer put in unctuously.

"Beman—" Lampert began. The lawyer checked him.

Peewee shrank unhappily. Beman was not threatening; he was not fighting. Whatever it was that he had learned it had, apparently, conquered the old man.

"You are Mr. Rubenwall?" he said to the lawyer.

"Yes, Mr. Beman."

Peewee saw anxiously that Beman waited in a subdued way for them to commence; when they did not, he was obliged to speak.
{{nop}}

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"There is some evidence, I understand, which you have discovered," he conceded.

The lawyer rubbed his hands; he had apparently been waiting for this. "Will you allow me, Mr. Beman to state the facts?"

"I'd be glad if you would," Beman agreed.

"Before the death of Mr. Lampert's daughter," the lawyer stated, "her family had not seen her for some years. There had been previously a still longer period when they had not known her whereabouts. You know, I have been told, the particulars of the discovery at the time of her death that she had a son."

"Just so," said Beman. "This is the boy."

Peewee moved uneasily upon his chair as all three turned to look at him. He avoided Lampert's gaze and stared resentfully at Beman. Beman's placating manner was causing him bitter bewilderment.

"Mr. Lampert had had so little recent communication with his daughter," the lawyer went on, "that he was as much surprised as others by the existence of this child."

Lampert seemed about to interrupt, but the

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lawyer stopped him by a gesture. "I speak of this, Mr. Beman, because Mr. Lampert's ignorance regarding the boy is one of the reasons why the discovery Mr. Lampert has now made was not made earlier. Two days before she died, Mr. Lampert's daughter sent for him and his wife and told them about the boy. Following her death, Mr. Lampert, as supposedly her nearest relative, assumed charge of his daughter effects."

Peewee remembered that; his grandfather had assumed charge particularly of his mother's rings.

"Among other things which came into Mr. Lampert's hands was, naturally, her trunk. The trunk contained, besides wearing apparel, such articles as a woman would be likely to accumulate in a number of years of—er—nomadic life."

"You mean letters?" Beman inquired.

"There were, among other things, a large number of letters."

"From Markyn?"

"None, so far as Mr. Lampert has yet found,

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from him. Mr. Lampert set himself to the careful examination of these letters."

"Naturally." Beman broke in. The dryness of the old man's tone gave Peewee for the first time a ray of hope. Beman, it showed him, was not being fooled. Beman comprehended, as clearly as Peewee did in his precocious wisdom, that Lampert had examined the letters to see if they gave him a chance to blackmail.

"This examination took—if Mr. Lampert will pardon my saying so—a considerable time when conducted by a gentleman of Mr. Lampert's limited education. Because of that, these many weeks elapsed before Mr. Lampert discovered, enclosed in one of the letters—with which, however, it had nothing to do—the evidence to which, Mr. Beman, you just now referred."

"It shows," Lampert broke out truculently, "that she'd ought to been living with him in his big house all the time; she'd ought to have had her servants—"

The lawyer stopped him. Peewee trembled at the assurance of his grandfather's voice.
{{nop}}

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"Just what is this?" Beman asked.

"What Mr. Lampert found was the written statement of a minister, legally correct, that on the eighteenth day of October, 1908, he performed the ceremony of marriage between Walter Wendell Markyn and Helen Lampert—"

"We've had the thing looked up," Lampert exclaimed. "We've found the town and the place where the ceremony was done. She'd ought to have been riding in her automobile all the time; she'd ought to have had money to send to her folks and have us to live with her."

Beeman listened silently.

"As Mr. Lampert says, our evidence shows that Helen Lampert, for more than ten years, was deprived of her marital rights," broke in the lawyer.

What, Peewee wondered, were marital rights?

"Helen Lampert is dead," said Beman. "It don't matter to her now what she was deprived of. What we're discussing here is the effect of this upon my granddaughter."

"That is why we came to you, Mr. Beman."

"Got this thing with you that you speak of?"
{{nop}}

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The lawyer took an envelope from his pocket. Lampert moved to interfere.

"You can trust me," Beman assured him.

Peewee thrilled excitedly. He thought that Beman, if they let him take the paper, would tear it up. He sank back in disappointment as the old man, having looked through the writing, merely gave it back.

"I ain't going to ask you yet how much you want from me for this," Beman remarked. "All I'm going to ask is, supposing I buy this now, what's to prevent you and Ben Lampert from sitting down and writing out another one and coming around and expecting to sell me that one too?"

Peewee shook. Beman got up with difficulty from his chair and moved on his stiff old legs to the {{hinc|hearth-rug}} and stood facing the two men.

"I wasn't sure about all this," he said. "He might have been fool enough sometime to marry her. But now I know, if this is how you had to get at the thing, he didn't. So I ain't asking you now what more there is you've got. You've figured out about the witnesses and license, I

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suppose. Maybe you found some place where those things could be faked, or where the court-house and its records had been burned. I ain't interested in that. This thing wasn't made up to carry into court. It was made to sell to Walter Markyn. When I found that you were ready to sell to some other buyer—that's me—I thought it probably was a frameup. If you hadn't come here, I wouldn't have known quite what to think. I've seen you both here now, and I've seen part of what you've got. That is enough for me."

"We expected you to do some talking, Beman."

"I'm doing it. You listen!"

Peewee shivered at Beman's voice which, thin and cracked with age, had become suddenly that of the cold-blooded operator who had watched callously his fortunes fail or grow, who had ruined twenty men and had himself been ruined half as many times—of the gambler who had fought not only against men, but had staked his all against drought and flood and taken his toll of dollars out of famine.
{{nop}}

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"There's been a lot of scandal said about me in my time. You might take note there's never been a word or line about my women folks. Once long ago a man came to me and wanted money not to print some lie about my oldest daughter. He didn't print it because by the next day noon I would have shot him dead. I was a young man then; I don't do things now in just that fashion."

"This is a legal matter, Mr. Beman."

"You listen to me. You're to drop this talk of Helen Lampert and her son entirely. I don't mean merely that you're to keep it out of court; there's to be no other kind of publicity." The voice was clear and cold and hard as ice. "If you splash my granddaughter's name with one drop of your mud, I'll ride you—I'll ride you both. If you don't know what that means, ask the boys on the Board of Trade about other men I've ridden. You've both got pasts that won't bear looking into; most men have. If you haven't, I'll make them for you. Do you get that? I know what kind of men I'm dealing with; I'll make pasts for you. I've got the

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money and the influence and, old as I am, I've still got the brain to bedevil you both until you'll wish that you were dead. There'll be no city big enough and no village small enough for you to hide in. The only dollar you'll ever get again will be by begging. You understand me?"

"We hear your actionable threats."

"All right. Read that!"

He moved stiffly to the table, took a paper from the drawer and threw it toward the lawyer. The lawyer hesitated, stooped and picked it up.

He read it and his hands dropped at his sides.

Peewee watched him curiously, wondering what this meant.

"All right," the lawyer said. "I'm through."

Lampert swore loudly. "You're what?" he asked.

"I'm through. I drop the case. You'll drop it too, if you are wise."

Lampert moved angrily to seize the paper, but stopped at the lawyer's gesture.

"You'll permit me, Mr. Beman," the lawyer inquired, "to read this to my client?"

Peewee strained forward in his excitement to

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hear. He could not distinguish all, as the lawyer read in a low, rapid voice; he could catch sentences.

"State of Illinois, County of Cook." What had that to do with it, Peewee wondered? "Whereas the undersigned Henry Mellen to-day appeared before me." What followed this Peewee could not hear. . . . "Deponent states he is, and was upon the twelfth day, of June, 1919, employed as a physician in the office of the coroner of above county." Peewee's experience had shown him what a coroner was. More. words followed which he could not make out. . . . "Did upon the twelfth day of June, 1919, perform upon the body of one Helen Lampert an autopsy." Peewee did not know what that meant. He caught other, but not directly succeeding words. . . . "Due to suspicion of death by drugs administered with murderous or suicidal intent." This was not plain to Peewee. . . . "Resulting in determination that death had ensued from natural causes, complicated and induced by exessive use of alcohol and drugs." There.

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was no understanding this stuff, Peewee decided. . . . "All as now upon file in records of the coroner's office. ''Deponent further states that the above Helen Lampert, upon whose body he performed this autopsy, had never borne a child."''

Peewee stared at Beman in perplexity. The words of the last sentence, taken just as words, were plain; their meaning he could not at first make out. His mother, the words said, had not had a child. But here was Peewee and Lampert, he saw, was as perplexed as himself.

"Why look at him!" Lampert exclaimed. "Don't he look just like his father?"

"But not like your daughter," Beman returned.

Peewee commenced to understand. Lampert—what was it Beman had called it?—forged, Lampert had forged a marriage, and Beman had forged to beat him. He had fooled the lawyer, who stood with his hands hanging limply at his sides. He had, Peewee could perceive by Lampert's manner, fooled Lampert too. They did not know the truth so well as he

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himself did; they had not been there when his mother, dying, had told him that he was her son.

"We quit," the lawyer said to Lampert. "If she had no kid, what's to be gained?"

Peewee understood still better. Beman had not attacked the false evidence of marriage; he had instead taken away the stake for which Lampert had played—the claim on Walter Markyn through Peewee's mother. Peewee was not capable of putting this so plainly for himself, but he comprehended the significance of it from the manner of Lampert and the lawyer. Lampert, he appreciated, did not any longer believe himself to be Peewee's grandfather, and Peewee was grateful to Beman for that, even though he himself still realized the relationship. Lampert and Rubenwall, still examining the paper, were talking together in low tones. They did not know that it was Peewee who had set Beman on them, and thus indirectly had defeated them.

Did what Beman had done to them mean that he no longer intended that Mrs. Markyn should

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be told? Peewee, recalling the inexplicable change in Beman which he had noticed, commenced to think it did. The old man saw the boy gazing at him and smiled dryly back at him, and Peewee warmed pleasantly at this sign of understanding between them. He looked again at the two men and back at Beman as he stood upon the {{hinc|hearthrug}}—massive, his hands clasped behind his back, his old legs wide apart and his great head pushed forward. Then he sidled off his chair and went and stood beside him, clasping his small hands behind his back and putting his short legs wide apart like him, and the two watched as the servant showed Lampert and Rubenwall out.

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When the sound of the closing of the outer door reached them, Beman looked down at Peewee sharply.

"Well," he demanded, "what do you think of it?"

Peewee decided that Beman wanted to be congratulated upon his cleverness.

"We fooled them," he replied.

The old man was gazing at him queerly. "You don't believe it then?"

"What, sir?"

"That she was not your mother?"

Was Beman trying to fool Peewee, too, the boy wondered, or was he merely trying to find out whether Peewee was as smart as he himself was? So long a time had passed that Peewee had forgotten the doubts he had had when

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Helen Lampert had first told him he was her son.

"She told me," he answered conclusively.

Beman's manner changed to one of indecision such as Peewee never had seen in him before. He seemed about to speak and then quite as obviously changed his mind. Peewee admired Beman without having any confidence in him; the comprehension of one another which existed between them did not encourage trust on the part of either.

He did not know definitely why, after leaving the room and going part way down the hall, he turned around and came back noiselessly to look in at the door and see what the old man was doing.

Beman was standing by the table and had taken up the affidavit and was looking it through carefully and with an appearance of perplexity as though it was something which he found it hard to understand. He shook his big head; finally he locked the paper solicitously in the table drawer. Was it possible Beman himself believed the affidavit? His consideration

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of it, which seemed to indicate this, amazed Peewee.

Peewee had intended to leave the house at the first opportunity and go back to the streets. Now, as he went slowly up the stairs toward the room which they called his, he was not so certain he would do that. It was clear that if Beman believed the affidavit, there was nothing he could tell Mrs. Markyn.

Beman on the next day received several visitors. Peewee was not able to catch sight of all these people, and those whom he did see he did not recognize. Some other person was admitted on the afternoon of the second day. Peewee had not seen this person admitted, but in passing through the upper hall he heard voices. One of these was Beman's voice; the other, he was almost certain, was that of Jeffrey Markyn Third, his uncle. Peewee went excitedly part way down the stairs to listen. He had learned that the men of the Markyn family came to Beman's very seldom. It was almost certain, therefore, that if the man in the library was Jeffrey Markyn, Mrs. Walter Markyn was the

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subject of their conversation, Peewee reasoned. The door from the library into the hall was closed; the voices reached him circuitously through an adjoining room whose door was evidently open. But it was unmistakable now that the deeper and more readily distinguished voice, which spoke in answer to Beman's, was Jeffrey's. Peewee did not dare to remain listening on the stairs because of the servants who passed frequently through the hall below. He went on downstairs into the front room below and seated himself on the window sill behind the curtains. He would be thought by anyone who saw him there to be merely looking out at the window, and now he could hear the voices plainly.

"But Walter acknowledged the boy," Jeffrey was saying, incredulously.

Peewee in his interest strained to listen.

"He appears to have done that merely on the statement of the woman." This was Beman's strong old voice, slightly cracked with age.

"The woman," Peewee comprehended, could not be Mrs. Markyn; Beman would have called

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her "Marion." He was not yet certain who "the woman" might be.

"I've talked with the nurse"—Beman's voice was going on—"the one who was taking care of her when she died. Had her here yesterday and talked with her. The coroner's physician came here too—they'd already got an affidavit from him for me, and what he said bore out that statement completely."

It was plain, then, that "the woman" was Peewee's mother. He recalled suddenly the kind-faced nurse in her striped dress who had paced outside the bedroom door while his mother was talking with him, and had come in and freed him from the grasp of her thin, hot hands. He had almost forgotten the nurse.

"The nurse"—Beman was speaking still—"had figured out the circumstances as they must have been. There wasn't anybody she could state her conclusions to. The boy had disappeared and she didn't know Walter's name."

"She agrees with the coroner's man?"

"That's not the question. The statement of

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the coroner's man that the woman had never borne a child isn't controvertible."

Peewee clenched his small hands; this talk, he thought, was hard to understand.

"The nurse simply worked out an explanation of the circumstances. They don't class the case as exceptionally remarkable; it's just from their point of view, a drug addict case. The nurse's name is Sandsby; she's had a lot of experience and was called to attend this Helen Lampert a week before the woman died."

The hard words, Peewee realized, were fewer in this last; if they would use common words he could get at the meaning of their conversation.

"The nurse says the woman talked freely to her. Her talk wasn't always sane; she was an excessive drug user. The nurse says the woman talked continually about a boy. The nurse didn't get the impression from her at first that she believed the boy to be her son. All she told the nurse in the beginning was that she had employed a private police agency to look the boy up. It was after the agency had reported to her that she told the nurse the boy

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was her son who had been taken from her by the courts while he was still a baby. She had lost trace of him afterward, she said, through some confusion of the court records."

"That was what Walter said," was Jeffrey's reply.

"Because the woman told him that. The nurse didn't see the police agency report. She believes now, from some things the woman said to her at the time, that it stated no more than that the boy's parentage was unknown. The woman, the nurse says, had been deeply in love with Walter—that is, as she puts it, with the man who came there afterward. The nurse doesn't know any of the names, except that of the Lampert woman. I didn't tell her any of them, either. The woman never hoped to marry him, of {{SIC|couse|course}}. After the affair had been broken off, she left Chicago. The nurse thinks it was because she couldn't bear to stay where she was continually thinking she might see him. She lived in other cities. The life she was leading and the drugs she used finally broke her down and she returned to die here where her family

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lived. Coming back here of course revived her memories of her love affair. Besides that, she saw Walter one day on the street, without his noticing her. That was before the nurse went to her, but she told of it. The nurse's theory is that the woman had regretted, after Walter's breaking off with her, that she had not had a child, and the sight of him renewed that regret. She was getting weaker and less responsible mentally all the time. Later she saw this newsboy and was struck by his resemblance to Walter, and her drug-crazed brain, the nurse thinks, suggested all the rest."

Peewee twisted his small body on the windowsill, perplexed.

"Suggested what?" This was Jeffrey's voice.

"That he was the child whom she wishçd to have. The police report, which could give no other parents for the boy, did not contradict her hallucination. Subsequently her insanity supplied the circumstances necessary to account for her separation from him. That is the nurse's theory."
{{nop}}

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Peewee shivered. He did not recall that when the woman, pressing her cracked and burning lips on his, had told him that he was her son, the feeling which she had given him was that she was "nuts." He had heard his father acknowledge the truth of what she said. Then other people had acknowledged it. He had forgotten his first impression in his conviction that it was so. But if he understood Beman correctly, they all had been merely "nuts."

Jeffrey was speaking.

"But you don't agree then with the nurse?"

"As to the woman's motives, you mean?" This was Beman. "It may have been that way, of course. On the other hand, it may have been revenge. When this Helen Lampert saw Walter she may have seen Marion too. The contrast between Marion and herself—poor, hard up and, she may have known, dying—must have been bitter for her. Afterward she saw the boy and noted the resemblance and learned that nothing was known about him. She may very well have felt that here was the chance for her to re-

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venge herself on Walter by claiming the boy as her son."

"That seems more probable."

"The woman's motive does not matter," Beman continued. "The nurse was there when the woman sent for her father and told him about the boy. She saw Walter, too, when he came there and the woman told him they had a son about whom she had never let him know, and she saw the boy afterward when he was brought there. There was no reason for the nurse, or for any of the others, to doubt the woman's story."

"Not even considering her insanity?"

"Her insanity was not evident, and the likeness appeared to confirm what she said. Have you seen the boy?"

"No."

"He looks exactly like Walter; you can't imagine two faces, feature for feature, more nearly the same."

"Good God! There can't have been still some other woman in Walter's life besides this one and Marion?"
{{nop}}

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Peewee stood up, shrinking anxiously.

"You don't understand. I'm not thinking about Walter or Marion now. I'm thinking about Edith." This was Beman.

"Edith! Great heavens! You don't suppose—"

There was silence in the library; for the moment nothing more followed this astonished exclamation, and Peewee was no longer listening to conversation which had already given him more than he could easily understand. The chief fact of this was clear: Helen Lampert had been merely "nuts" or had been lying. It followed that the man who, on the evidence of what she had told him, had admitted his parentage of Peewee was not his father.

He perceived, as he comprehended this, the extent of the mistake resulting from what the woman had said. It had made Walter Markyn give the Lamperts money to keep them quiet about Peewee; it had made Mrs. Markyn unhappy and anxious; it had caused anxiety to Jeffrey Markyn and to Beman. That fierce old man—who, Peewee had learned, took revenge

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upon whoever deceived him—had, under his misapprehension, taken him into his own house and given him new clothes and had him cared for. Now that the deceit of this was known to them, what would they do to the boy who had made them suffer so unnecessarily?

He noted with uneasiness that the silence caused by what had been last said in the library continued. If they were through talking and were to come out, they might see through the curtains against the light. He ran out of the room into the hall, and backed watchfully up the stairs, eyeing the library door until he could no longer see it. He listened, as he continued to back through the upper hall. This brought him to another {{hinc|stairhead}}, whose winding steps led down to the servants' quarters. Someone was undoubtedly moving in the front hall; it might or might not be merely a servant; he thought the person was beginning to come upstairs. He dashed precipitately down the servants' stair, out at the rear door, across the court and through the passageway between the buildings opposite. He sped down Astor Street to the

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first cross street and doubled back to the Lake Shore Drive. No one had come out at the front door; no one, so far as the evidence of the cross street went, appeared to have followed him from the rear. He walked away, still gazing back at the house.

His chief reason for staying at Beman's had been that he could expect to see Mrs. Markyn. There had been good food there too, and a nice place to sleep. But except for these things he had no very definite personal feeling over what he had heard. He had resented his relationship to Walter Markyn, because it interfered between him and Walter's wife. Wouldn't he ever see her any more? She would not, he thought, have the same anger against him as the others; perhaps he could wait where she took her walk, and she would talk with him, and perhaps kiss him, without feeling that he had to have anyone to take care of him.

He had in his pocket the five dollar bill which she had given him. He found a small store in which only a woman was waiting upon customers and got her to change it. The paper

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money he wrapped in a piece of newspaper, making a careless looking package, and the silver he put in his trousers' pocket. He was beginning to think eagerly about the "loop." Were the boys there whom he had known before? Which of them had been sent to institutions and schools, and which had managed to avoid the authorities?

He followed the alleys south to the river and crossed Wells Street bridge. A clock on a corner told him that it was four o'clock; he had no reason therefore to fear truant officers or police within the "loop." The roar of uninterrupted traffic and sidewalks so crowded that he had to dodge between the legs of pedestrians filled him with delight. He went south to where the wagonmen were delivering the boys their papers and stood watching. He was not, he realized, fitly dressed for business while in the clothes which Walter Markyn had given him. He noted behind a truck in the mouth of the alley a boy absorbedly counting pennies, who was about his own size and dressed in comfortable old clothes with holes at the elbows and the

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knees; and he went guardedly up to face him.

"Trade you clothes," he offered.

The boy surveyed him in astonishment. "What's the big idea, kid?" he inquired. "Gone dippy?"

"No, I ain't."

The boy felt of Peewee's clothes incredulously. "You ain't game," he urged.

They exchanged clothes behind the truck, and the other boy seizing the coat without waiting to put it on, dashed swiftly away down the alley, apprehensive that some authority might interfere with the exchange. Peewee went to the wagonman and got his papers. The sensation of clothes which someone else already had worn gave him a feeling of liberty which he had not enjoyed since his incarceration on the farm. He felt himself—without analyzing this feeling—a part of the city again, as the sparrows were a part. Nobody except small boys paid any heed to the sparrows, and nobody except boys would pay any heed to him.

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Peéwee was disappointed to find that the place on Madison Street which formerly had been recognized as his was now occupied by another boy. The boy's much larger size forbade any attempt to deprive him of his post by force, and Peewee was obliged to take a block further west, where there were not so many people passing.

Women had always been his best customers; they were now. When he saw one approaching, he held out a paper and raised his big blue eyes under their long black lashes appealingly. He had enjoyed, when he sold newspapers before, watching the effect of this on the women—to see their inattentive expression, as they glanced at him, change suddenly to tenderness and pity and to have them buy papers which probably they did

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not want. This look upon women's faces now gave him an indefinite unhappiness; he thought of Mrs. Markyn when he saw it. A man almost as old as Beman stopped and bought a paper. Was he, Peewee wondered, a grandfather? Beman, if Mrs. Markyn had had children, would have been a great-grandfather. What was Beman doing now? What was Walter Markyn doing, now that he had found out that Peewee was not his son?

When he had been on the streets before, he had found happiness in watching for the unexpected things that happened. People had poured past as if they had emerged out of blank space and disappeared into blank space again, and he had been satisfied merely to speculate upon what kind of people they were. He found something almost painful now in that kind of speculation. He felt vaguely that the people or the streets had changed. It did not occur to him that the change was in himself; that he had been before without origin and without attachment, an atom floating in the gutters, but that now, for several months, he had been thinking

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of himself as a member of a family. His "father" had proved not to be his father, his "mother" not his mother. They had revealed to him, however, the feelings of relationship.

Peewee felt for the first time the lonesomeness of crowded streets. At seven o'clock, when children had to be outside the "loop," he gave his papers to the man who had a newstand on the corner—the wagonmen would not take "returns"—and went west on Madison Street to Halsted. A sudden hopefulness came to him at sight of Halsted Street, more crowded at this hour than any other. The moving picture shows were open, with their entrances brilliant with electric lights; family parties—parents with children—were going in. He had money and he followed a party in. He did not know why he did not find satisfaction in the picture, but watched instead a stout woman who was explaining it to a little boy and girl. He came out when the show was over, and moved slowly south. At ten o'clock he was at Halsted Street and Twelfth and sat down upon the curb to observe a basement entrance. A disreputable

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looking man, advancing along Twelfth Street, knocked at the basement door and was let in. The uses of the place, then, were the same as when he had been on the streets before. Peewee descended to the basement. An old man, encrusted with dirt, to whom he gave three cents, admitted him to a space under the sidewalk where some people were already sleeping. He spread newspapers, which the old man provided, and lay down. He was not comfortable and the place was filled with disagreeable odors.

He bought rolls in the morning in a delicatessen and walked east on Twelfth Street, eating them. The contrast between Beman and the old man with whom he had lodged occurred to him, and he thought that Beman now had got up and was eating breakfast with a knife and fork. The morning was growing warm and beyond the buildings and the railroad tracks where the cross streets ended, boys were bathing in the lake. He crossed the tracks, and took off his clothes and made a bundle of them. He dug a hole in the sand, put the clothes into it, put a piece of board over the hole and covered

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it with sand. Protected thus against the loss of the clothes, or the impounding of them if a policeman came, he dived and romped with the other boys.

He did not know why the satisfaction which he found in this disappeared as afternoon approached.

When it grew late enough, he went to the "loop" to get his papers. He stood a long while watching the wagonmen, but made no move to get any papers, and finally walked slowly north. He did not consciously plan where he was going, but presently he saw the Lake Shore Drive and Beman's house. He sat down on the esplanade across from the house, looking at it. He knew now that he wanted to go back to Beman, but he knew also that this was impossible because of Beman's anger.

The connection between himself and Beman, when he had believed himself the son of Walter Markyn, had been attenuated; still there had seemed then an actual connection. That he was the son of Beman's granddaughter's husband had given him a certain right to be in the house.

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Only people related to Beman, he realized, had that right.

He got up, unhappily, after a while, and walked away. When he had gone a little distance, he stopped, hesitated and went back. Again he got up and went away, and again he came back. As he returned this second time, he observed on the sidewalk across the drive from him a man keeping pace with him. The character of the man was unmistakable—he was a plain-clothes officer, a "flat-foot"—and the sight of him drove the thought of Beman out of Peewee's head. Was the man watching him? He walked on past the house a distance and turned back. The man also turned back. Peewee considered his position. He was between the "flat-foot" and the lake; as long as the officer kept opposite him there was no chance of escape. He picked up a pebble and threw it ahead of him and ran after it as if chasing it; when he had reached the pebble, he continued still to run. The man opposite now broke into a run also, crossing the drive diagonally. Peewee dodged back; the man turned

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back also, his diagonals bringing him continu-

ally nearer as Peewee darted back and forth, until they forced the boy to the edge of the lake. There the man seized him.

"You H. Seabury?" he demanded.

Peewee did not reply. He decided that what had happened to him was that he had been retaken by the Juvenile Court. So he stiffened with surprise, as the man led him across the drive toward Beman's and rang the bell.

The servant who admitted them led the way to Beman's den.

"This the boy?" the officer asked, pushing Peewee in.

"That's the one," Beman replied.

"I thought he must be. He was hanging around outside here, looking at the house."

Peewee stared at Beman defiantly. What form would Beman's punishment of him take? The old man looked sternly at him.

"What were you hanging around outside for?" he inquired.

There was less sternness in Beman's voice than in his look. It encouraged Peewee to find

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that the old man did not seem angry with him.

"I thought I'd like to come back here?" he offered.

He could not tell the effect of this on Beman. The old man got up and stood before the fire-place, while he seemed to consider something.

"Anybody ever offer to adopt you?" he asked.

The mildness of his tone gave still further encouragement to Peewee. "No, sir," he said.

Adoption, as a fact, was known to him, though not the complete particulars of the process. A person picked out the prettiest child in an institution, and certain formalities followed, which were vague to Peewee. Following that, the person said to the child, "Now you must call me 'mother,' or 'father.{{' "}}

"What would you think of that?" Beman questioned.

Peewee did not answer. He could not conceive of Beman's adopting him, and the old man seemed to read the beginning of that thought and hastened to forestall it.

"Not me," he offered. "Someone else."
{{nop}}

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Peewee's pulse beat quickened. Was it possible that Beman meant that Mrs. Markyn might adopt him?

"Who?" he asked.

"Mrs. Cord."

Peewee shook his head angrily in his disappointment. He recalled the picture in the bedroom upstairs. Mrs. Cord was a pretty lady, but he had no wish to be adopted by someone whom he did not know.

"The proposition doesn't interest you?"

"No, sir," said Peewee.

"You're willing to stay here for a while now though, ain't you?"

"Yes, sir."

The question was apparently a dismissal. Peewee backed to the door, and, as Beman made no motion to detain him, then backed on out. He heard Beman's voice in some unintelligible conversation with the "flat-foot," who presently went away. Then he sat by the front window, where he could see Mrs. Markyn if she came, considering what Beman had said to him. Adoption, it was clear, did not make the person

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actually his mother. It implied, he felt sure, that he would have to live with her, however. He did not, he felt, want to go and live with Mrs. Cord. He went up, after a while, to look at the portrait on the dresser. She did not, he felt, attract him. What he wanted was to live where he could see Mrs. Markyn.

He noted uneasily that he dined alone instead of eating with the servants as he had when he was here before. Did this, taken in connection with the queer way that Beman had looked at him, mean that the adoption was to take place in spite of him? When he had finished dinner he went back to the window. It was growing dark; a thin mist had come in upon the city from the lake, through which the boulevard lamps and the automobile lights glowed hazily. He had decided that Mrs. Markyn would not come so late, when a limousine stopped before the house and Walter Markyn got out. There was a woman in the motor with him. She was not, Peewee realized, Mrs. Markyn; the indistinct glimpse he had of her—pretty, delicate, blond-haired—told him that it was Mrs. Cord.

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It was a relief to him when the car drove on with her, and Walter came into the house alone and was shown into the library.

Peewee vibrated between the hall, where voices from the library could be heard, in the library, and the window. His anxiety increased as he observed by the light of the street lamp, the "flat-foot" returning to the house in company with another man. The other's appearance was only less definitely official. At the door they exchanged inaudible words with the servant, who knocked at the library door and let them in.

Peewee retreated tentatively part way up the stairs. He would, if it proved that he was to be adopted in spite of himself, use the same line of escape which he had used before and get out at the back door. He went further up the stairs, but halted doubtfully as the doorbell rang again and Jeffrey Markyn and Mrs. Walter Markyn were let in. Would they have had Mrs. Markyn here and not Mrs. Cord, if they were proceeding with the adoption? What was happening was incomprehensible, he thought.

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The door of the library had remained open and he heard Beman's voice in some unintelligible suggestion, which Jeffrey appeared to oppose; then Beman's voice again more loudly: "No; have him in." Beman came out into the hall and looked about for Peewee. "Come down here," he directed, seeing him on the stair.

Peewee descended, steeling himself for trouble.

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{{ph|class=chapter num|Chapter Seventeen}}
{{ph|class=chapter title|In His Mother's {{SIC|Arms.}}|level=2}}

The lack of trust which Peewee had in Beman now thrust itself upon him disturbingly. He looked apprehensively about the room, as the old man led him in and the door was closed behind them. Jeffrey Markyn came toward him and put his finger under Peewee's chin and turned his small face up and studied it. He looked from it to his brother, where he sat beside Mrs. Markyn, holding her hand. She smiled in a strained way to greet the boy. She was very pale. What had they said to her, Peewee wondered, that had made her look like this? Beman, still holding Peewee by the hand, seated himself in his big chair and drew the boy between his knees.

"Now, Mr. Rollins," he invited.

The man who had come with the "flat-foot"

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seemed to Peewee something between a policeman and a clerk. "Mr. Beman knows I haven't been able to gather much on this," he said. "It's too long ago—six years. The officer here, who was the one that picked up the kid, had forgotten the circumstances, until I showed him the record of the court. I've got a summary of that here."

Peewee stared suspiciously. Was he the kid? "Listen," Beman commanded in his ear.

"He's a tough kid," the man commented, "if you come to that. He's run away from every home they put him in. He run away from the Greenwood Boys' Home, which not many run away from. Before that he run away from the orphan asylum. That's how the court came to send him to the Home."

"Begin at the beginning of the record," Beman said.

"All right." The man referred to a paper. "The officer took the kid up on Cottage Grove Avenue near Thirty-fifth Street," he said. "He remembers that part perfectly."

"That's right," the policeman put in.
{{nop}}

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"He took him to the Cottage Grove Avenue station."

"What date?" Beman suggested.

"January 17, 1915. He was held at the station until the nineteenth, expecting somebody would claim him. They most always do with lost kids. He couldn't tell his name or where he lived, and there weren't any marks on his clothing. That's right?"

"That's right, the policeman assented.

"On the nineteenth, nobody claiming him, he was turned over to the Juvenile Court. The court judged him to be two, or maybe a little under two years old, and he was assigned temporarily to St. Anthony's Orphan Asylum, expecting someone related to him would turn up. Nobody did, and a year later he was brought in court again on the ground that for the records of the asylum he ought to have a name. The court gave him the name H. Seabury—no record of what is stood for by 'H'."

"Do you remember that?" Beman asked of Peewee.

"No, sir," Peewee said.
{{nop}}

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"Don't remember having a name given you in court?"

Peewee squirmed combatively. What did all this mean? Why was he expected to remember? He could not understand what was going on. "No, sir," he said.

"Don't remember this policeman taking you up?"

"No, sir."

"Don't remember being lost?"

Peewee looked at Mrs. Markyn. She was paler than before; her blue eyes were wide and fixed eagerly upon him. If she wanted him to remember, he wished that he could.

"Let me try with him," she said to Beman.

She drew him away from the old man and held him against her knee. Her touch, as always, filled him with incomprehensible feelings. He stared distrustfully at the men but pressed closer to her. She was affected, too; her hands shook as they clasped him, her temples whitened and her eyes shone nervously.

"We'll begin," she suggested, "with things that you do remember and see if then you can't

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remember back. You told me, you know, that you didn't know who your parents were."

"Yes'm," he admitted.

"But that—that woman had told you that she was your mother and had told you who she said your father was."

He winced and gazed at her unhappily. They had told her, then, about the woman. She must, he comprehended, if she knew that, know all the rest. It was not quite clear to him, since the woman had proved not to be his mother, what the effect of this upon her must be. Didn't it matter to her now? He felt vaguely that there must still be pain of some sort in it for her, but she had forgiven her husband, it appeared, for she had let him hold her hand.

"Why did you tell me that?" she {{SIC|asked|asked.}}

He hesitated, doubtful whether to tell her the truth. He might, he decided, do that now, since the other things were known to her. "They said it would spoil your life to know about me," he confessed.

She appeared not to understand. Walter

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Markyn moved as if startled, and seemed about to speak. Beman scrutinized Peewee curiously. The old man seemed to puzzle over something and suddenly to comprehend, and raised his hand to check Walter. "Let her go on," he commanded.

"Spoil my life?" she echoed. "I don't know what you mean."

Peewee felt relief. He had not been conscious that the necessity he had had of lying to her about himself had made him feel his separation from her until now when the need for that had been removed.

"I was at the house," he confided.

"The house?" She drew her straight, dark brows together, puzzled.

"I went there after my—after that woman told me where he lived." He pointed at Walter. "They were talking there, and they said it would spoil your life to know about me, so I went out and shut the door and went away."

"My God!" said Jeffrey.

The woman comprehended. She drew him closer, her lip trembled and her eyes filled sud-

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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.
{{nop}}

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"No'm," he said, after an interval.

"It didn't make you think back to anybody else when she told you that she was your mother?"

"No'm."

The woman paused uncertainly, looking about with damp eyes questioningly at the others.

"There's nothing to be accomplished this way," Jeffrey answered to her look. "We're asking the impossible of the boy. A child of two couldn't possibly hold such memories for such a length of time and after experiences such as this boy has gone through."

"That's right," Beman replied to him. "It must be accepted only as a possibility. The dates coincide—the night of January 16 and the morning of the seventeenth. An unclaimed child found that morning on the street has grown in the years between to look exactly like Walter. Anything more definite than that you simply must assume. There were, we know, other babies in the same car. The body of the burned child was unrecognizable. There were

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other, burned, unrecognizable bodies. You can assume if you want that the child belonged to one of them, that the nurse had picked up some other's baby—not necessarily by mistake. She may have been unable to reach the child and tried to save the first other child that offered. You can say that the substitution never was suspected, that Edith's child, escaping in some way, wandered off and was found next morning by the police officer. But it's nothing but assumption. It never can be proved. It might warrant adoption—"

The woman, still clasping Peewee, looked up at him. "It does," she asserted. "It warrants more than that, even though we can never have absolute conviction."

What was going on was incomprehensible to Peewee. He heard the words that Beman and Mrs. Markyn said, but they conveyed no meaning to him. Some child, at some time, had been burned to death in a train wreck. The unfortunate fate of this child seemed to give Peewee warrant for his own anxiety on trains. Who, he wondered, was Edith? Was she Mrs. Cord?

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Was this some other adoption they were talking of? What he perceived was that whatever was happening was, in its progression, drawing him more intimately to Mrs. Markyn. She held him closer; there was tenderness and protection in her clasp. He enjoyed this, but continued to regard the men with suspicion.

He felt a sudden loss as she stood up, releasing him abruptly. Looking up, he saw her, white now as death, a light of excitement shining in her eyes, and her full lips set tight together. She looked, he thought, like someone to whom some startling memory had just occurred. She left him and went hurriedly to Beman and spoke to him in low tones, eagerly.

Peewee could catch only the words, "I have a letter—"

The old man, listening to her, frowned doubtfully. Peewee had, incomprehensibly, the feeling that she, in need of help, had turned to that violent, harsh but capable old man, as he himself had once done. What help? Jeffrey and Walter had gone closer to them to listen. Beman drew the police officer aside and spoke

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to him. The officer's reply was clear to Peewee.

"Sure I can get him. Now?"

"My car's outside," said Jeffrey. "Use it."

The policeman went quickly out, motioning to the other man, who followed him.

"I'll go for the letter myself," said Mrs. Markyn. "Walter, come with me."

They too went out. Peewee heard the closing of the entrance door, the sound of motors, and stared doubtfully at the two men. Beman, his gray old cheeks a little flushed, waited in his great chair; Jeffrey paced nervously up and down, halting now and then to exchange words inaudibly with Beman. Peewee wanted to question Beman, but decided not to commit himself by doing so. The long hand of the clock moved half way round before he heard the front door again and the policeman entered followed by another man, whom Peewee felt sure was a policeman too. The new man greeted Beman and Jeffrey as though he did not know them and opened a handbag which he carried and laid articles out upon the table—ink and a little pad and oblong cards with words in small print

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along the edge of them. Mrs. Markyn and Walter came in hurriedly. The man took the folded note paper which Mrs. Markyn gave him and opened it out under the library lamp and looked at it through a magnifying glass. "It ain't so bad," he said. "Much better than you ought to expect to get under such circumstances. Come here," he ordered.

Peewee hesitated; Jeffrey gently pushed him toward the stranger.

"It's the left hand," the man directed. He took Peewee's small left hand and rolled his fingers one by one upon the pad and then upon one of the cards. "Let's try again," he said, repeating the process.

The conversation of the streets had taught Peewee that they took the finger marks of criminals like this. He did not know exactly why they took his but he resented it. Did they think he had done something? He looked across the man's arm at the letter which Mrs. Markyn had brought, and conceived a certain contempt because of its beginning—"My dearest," it began. A corner of the sheet was black with ink,

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and half way down the page were five queer blots with a pencil mark around them which made a little hand. It was less easy for him to read handwriting than print, but he spelled out the words written close about the hand: "He's been sitting in my lap, dear, while I wrote and he tipped over the ink bottle; when I started to write again, I found the prints of his five little fingers on the page, so I put his hand back the way it had been and marked around it for you."

Jeffrey drew Peewee back from the table. The man took the cards that he had made and put them close beside the letter and looked at them through a magnifying glass.

The clock, ticking very slowly indeed, became audible in the room. Jeffrey kept hold of Peewee; Walter walked nervously up and down; Beman sat still; Mrs. Markyn strained forward across the table.

What was it, Peewee wondered suspiciously, that was going on? The excitement in all of them was clear to him.

"There's three of them," the man remarked,

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"that ain't good enough to go by, but the index and the middle finger are plain."

The clock ticked on again interminably. The man looked up at Mrs. Markyn and she leaned eagerly toward him.

"They're the same," he said decisively.

Peewee heard Jeffrey's voice: "My God! think of the strangeness of the thing! That woman, crazed with drugs or with desire to revenge herself on Walter, picked the boy up upon the street because of his likeness to Walter and sends him to us, and he proves to be Edith's baby! No wonder they say God moves in a mysterious way!"

"What's stranger"—this was Walter—"is the attraction Edith has had for him. The boy has shown feeling toward her and toward nobody else."

"That's not necessarily strange." Beman was speaking. "He had been with his mother until he was almost two years old. It's unquestionable that some unconscious memory of her must have been left in him. He didn't know, of course, why she attracted him like that."
{{nop}}

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Peewee did not find any meaning in these words. Mrs. Markyn was coming toward him. She stumbled slightly, as if from weakness, as she crossed the floor.

"Wait!" Walter warned her. "He doesn't understand. He thinks you're Marion."

She stared at him as if trying to find sense in what he said to her.

"I didn't know that until just now," Walter made clear to her. "When you were speaking to him of himself, he said that it was for your happiness that he hadn't wanted you to know about him. You didn't realize what he meant by that. I'd talked with him, of course; you had too. I can't remember that he ever spoke your name. I assumed it was my wife that he had met and talked with because he said so. Of course I never dared to speak of him before her. The place he saw you, too, was at my house. When you brought him here—"

"The talk was short," Beman broke in. "The boy's mistake is clear enough. I saw it too. He's too bewildered now to understand."

The woman controlled herself. Her body

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quivered as she drew Peewee to her and clasped him with her trembling arms. Her sweet blue eyes showed comprehension now, shining through tears and strangely deep and tender, as she fought her feelings down.

"Dear, how did you find out who I was?"

He wanted to remember that if it would please her.

"I saw your picture."

"Yes, dear. Where was it? Did it have my name on it? Tell me about the picture."

"It was in the newspaper."

He was trying to recollect.

There had been two pretty ladies in the newspaper picture—this one and the woman he had seen for the first time to-night, when she had leaned from the limousine to speak to Walter and then had driven on. Their names had been below.

"It said Mrs. Walter Markyn," he replied.

"Yes, dear."

"And—." He hesitated. "And Mrs. Cord," he said.

"Who told you, dear, which one was I?"
{{nop}}

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He could not answer that. Something new to him and incomprehensible, which had stirred within him at her pictured face, had centered all his interest on her. He had choked to think how pretty she was, with what tenderness and sweetness in her look, and he had coupled the name which he had supposed to be his father's unquestioningly with her.

He gazed at her doubtfully.

"Try to understand. I am not Mrs. Markyn. She was the other one. The other name belonged to me. I was Edith Markyn once; now I am Mrs. Cord."

He had trouble comprehending this reversal of his thought. Everything he had done regarding her since he first had seen her had been because he had believed her to be Walter's wife. He merely stared at her, as she kept on talking to him.

She was talking now, it appeared, about the other child—the one who had been burned. That child's father, Peewee gathered, had been a naval officer. In gun practice—whatever that might be—off some place called Porto Rico, he

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and other men had been injured by an explosion. The child's mother—Peewee was not yet sure who that was—had been at the time in New York with her baby but no other member of her family. Obliged to hasten to her wounded husband, she had sent the child in charge of its nurse to her family in Chicago. The train was wrecked on the Lake Front and the car that they were in was burned. The body of the nurse was found with a dead child whom fire had made unrecognizable clasped in her arms.

It was, Peewee recognized, unfortunate for the woman; she had lost both her husband and her child.

He rather liked the naval officer's name—Lieutenant Arthur Cord. The child's name too had been Arthur. As he reflected on these things, her feelings broke from her control.

"Baby, baby, don't you understand? I am your mother, darling boy—your mother!"

He felt her kisses on his cheeks and mouth; her lips, which had felt always cool and sweet before, were hot, burning almost as Helen Lam-

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pert's cracked, puffed lips had burned him. She clutched him as she controlled her sobs.

"I'd brought back with me, dear, your father's things—even my own letters which he had saved. I'd kept them all these years. Thank God for that, for on one of them were the print marks of your baby fingers. Except for those we never could have been sure."

He was not sure that he wanted her to be his mother. What he wanted was that she should be toward him as she had always been, and he did not know exactly how a mother was. Edith raised her eyes, bright with her tears, to Beman.

"And except for you," she said to the old man, "we never should have found out about him."

"It was the likeness," Beman said. "Inquiry about the woman led me to the coroner's man. When he told me she had never had a child the boy's likeness to Walter became inexplicable. Then the boy's record showed the coincidence of dates. It is no more remarkable for him to look like his uncle than if he had looked like his father."
{{nop}}

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"How much about the boy does Marion know?" Jeffrey inquired.

"Nothing." Walter raised his head. He had been sitting with his face buried in his hands. "She's never even heard of him. We have the boy himself to thank for that." He flushed, looking at his brother and his sister. "A man's past rises up to strike at him—"

"It's buried now with Helen Lampert," Jeffrey replied. He looked at Beman, and the old man nodded.

The manner of the men toward Peewee had changed. There was frankness in their look and liking. He perceived the difference in them without understanding it at first, and still looked at them suspiciously.

But he was commencing to adjust himself. These, he recalled, were members of his family. He was the grandson of the "city-builder," the great-grandson of the still older Jeffrey Markyn. He thought of the great houses in which the family lived. He would be free, he understood, to go in and out of those houses. He would ride, he foresaw, in their motors,

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and now certainly, if he asked it, they would let him drive the car. His heart beat more quickly at this last thought.

He saw Jeffrey smiling at him, and returned the smile. He stood still within his mother's arms. He looked at Walter. Suddenly a sense of possession came to him in her and in his uncles./last/

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—cov