"I am afraid, Miss Julia," said he, "that you don't quite know who he is, that boy."
"Ah, do I not! Why, he is my boy, my own boy!"
"I beg pardon, but what do you mean, Miss Julia?"
"I say he's my boy! What I say about that is privileged—it's professional, Judge Henderson. No one else has heard me say what I am telling you now. But he is my boy—my love has gone into him, the same as if I were his mother."
He only stared as she rushed on.
"I know his mother—we have been friends here since we were girls, real friends. I'm the only friend she's got in this town—and the only fair and kind thing this town has ever done has been to allow me to be the friend of Aurora Lane. I suppose that's because I am only the little lame librarian! I don't count. She doesn't count. But—well, between us two—we've had a boy!"
He stared, pale, as she went on:
"Between us two, we've brought him up. We've educated him. Between us two, we have saved our money—it wasn't much—and we've managed to give him something of an education, something of a life more than he could have gotten in this town. We have put him through college—we have given him a profession—we were going to give him a start.
"I say 'we,' and I mean that. But, it isn't the money of mine that went into him—it's my love—it's the love I felt for him! Why, Judge, I've seen him grow up. I've held him in my two hands, this way, when he was so little ... oh, very little.... So you see, he's my boy, too!
"And so," she added inconsequently, as he made no answer, "I came to you." (What the angels understood in Miss Julia's unspoken words then they did not make plain to the ears of the man who heard them.)