this mother's denial and ultimate appeal.

Now he spoke rapidly. The yearning to spare this woman, who had
already suffered so much, urged him. To prolong the telling he felt
would be cruelty unthinkable. He felt brevity to be the only way to
spare her.

"He was shot by a tough," he said. "It was at the Elysian Fields. He
was dancing, and there was a quarrel. If blame there was for Alec it
was just his youth, I guess. Just sit, and I'll hand it you--all."

He moved from the table. He came to the mother's side. His strong
hand rested on her shoulder, and somehow she obeyed his touch and sank
into the chair behind her. It was the chair from which she had watched
her little world grow up about her, the chair in which she had pondered
on the first great tragedy of her life.

Her lips were unmoving. Her eyes terrible in their stony calm. They
mechanically regarded the man before her with so little understanding
that he wondered if he should proceed.

Presently, however, he was left no choice.

"Go on," she said, and her hands clasped themselves in her lap with a
nerve force suggesting the physical clinging which remained her only
support.

And at her bidding the man talked. He told his story in naked outline,
smothering the details of her boy's delinquencies, and sparing her
everything which could wound her mother's pride and devotion. His
purpose was clearly defined. The wound he had to inflict was well-nigh
mortal, but no word or act of his should aggravate it. His story was a
consummate effort of loyalty to the dead and mercy to the living.

Even in the telling he wondered if those wide-gazing, stricken eyes
were reading somewhere in the depths of his soul the real secrets he
was striving so ardently to withhold. He could not tell. His
knowledge of women was limited, so limited. He hoped that he had
succeeded.

At the conclusion of his pitiful story he waited. His purpose was to
leave the woman to her grief, believing that time, and her wonderful
courage, would help her. But it was difficult, and all that was in him
bade him stay, and out of his own great courage seek to help her.

He stirred. The moment was dreadful in its hopelessness.

"Jessie will be along," he said.

The mother looked up with a start.

"Yes," she said. "She's all I have left. Oh, God, it will break her
young heart."

There was no thought of self in that supreme moment. The mother was
above and beyond her o