hen he saw it in the shop window.

"It was noble of you," she said, "to spend all your siller on me."

"Wasn't it, mother?" he crowed "I'm thinking there ain't many as noble
as I is!"

He did not say why he had been so good to her, but it was because she
had written no letters to Thrums since the intrusion of Elspeth; a
strange reason for a boy whose greatest glory at one time had been to
sit on the fender and exultingly watch his mother write down words that
would be read aloud in the wonderful place. She was a long time in
writing a letter, but that only made the whole evening romantic, and he
found an arduous employment in keeping his tongue wet in preparation for
the licking of the stamp.

But she could not write to the Thrums folk now without telling them of
Elspeth, who was at present sleeping the sleep of the shameless in the
hollow of the bed, and so for his sake, Tommy thought, she meant to
write no more. For his sake, mark you, not for her own. She had often
told him that some day he should go to Thrums, but not with her; she
would be far away from him then in a dark place she was awid to be lying
in. Thus it seemed, to Tommy that she denied herself the pleasure of
writing to Thrums lest the sorry news of Elspeth's advent should spoil
his reception when he went north.

So grateful Tommy gave her the picture, hoping that it would fill the
void. But it did not. She put it on the mantelpiece so that she might
just sit and look at it, she said, and he grinned at it from every part
of the room, but when he returned to her, he saw that she was neither
looking at it nor thinking of it. She was looking straight before her,
and sometimes her lips twitched, and then she drew them into her mouth
to keep them still. It is a kind of dry weeping that sometimes comes to
miserable ones when their minds stray into the happy past, and Tommy sat
and watched her silently for a long time, never doubting that the cause
of all her woe was that she could not write to Thrums.

He had seldom seen tears on his mother's face, but he saw one now. They
had been reluctant to come for many a day, and this one formed itself
beneath her eye and sat there like a blob of blood.

His own began to come more freely. But she needn't not expect him to
tell her to write nor to say that he didn't care what Thrums thought of
him so long as she was happy.

The tear rolled down his mother's thin cheek and fell on the grey shawl
that had come from