Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/76

72 she still hatches chickens in her bed, the way my first father used to tell me she did."

A change came into the old man's face. All of the hard lines softened and into his keen blue eyes there crept an expression of infinite longing. Up to that moment he had been almost sure the strange little gypsy-like child was none of his blood. No Taylor could be so dark-eyed and different looking from all other Taylors. When she had laughed and declared the joke was on her, he had seen something that in a way had reminded him of his boy Tom, but then he argued that he had been looking for traces of his boy and it would be easy to fool him.

As for Rebecca's thinking Spot was her father, that was too stagy to be impromptu. But this remark about Aunt Pearly Gates and her hatching chickens in her bed—the conviction of the girl's being of his own flesh and blood came to him like a flash. How could he ever have doubted it? What was mere color of hair and eyes? Even shapes of noses and mouths didn't count for much in heredity compared to a certain spirit that it was possible to hand down.

That was his boy Tom who had been speaking, his Tom who had so boldly stood up for the young Bolling chap who had befriended the little waif on the journey, his Tom who had