You are too young to understand this as you will some day----"
"The trouble with me," I blurted out, "is that I've never had much to do
with good women--only with my mother and Mrs. Fogg--and they could never
have anything said against them--neither of them!"
"Where have you lived all your life?" he asked.
Then I told him of the way I had picked up my hat and come up instead of
being brought up, of the women along the canal, of her who called
herself Alice Rucker, of the woman who stole across the river with
me--but I didn't mention her name--of as much as I could think of in my
past history; and all the time Elder Thorndyke gazed at me with
increasing interest, and with something the look we have in listening to
tales of midnight murder and groaning ghosts. I must have been an
astonishing sort of mystery to him. Certainly I was a castaway and an
outcast to his ministerial mind; and boy as I was, he seemed to feel for
me a sort of awed respect mixed up a little with horror.
"Heavenly Father!" he blurted out. "You have escaped as by the skin of
your teeth."
"I do' know," said I.
"But don't you understand," he insisted, "that this, trip has got to end
here? Suppose your mother, when she was a child in fact, but a woman
grown also, like Miss Royall, had been placed as she is with a boy of
your age and one who had lived your life----"
"No," said I, "it won't do. You can have her!"
4
I really felt as if I was giving-up something that had belonged to me.
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