Gila's mother? Pah! That painted,
purple image of a mother! Her own daughter needed to find a real mother
somewhere. She couldn't mother a stranger! Mothers! Why weren't there
enough real ones to go around? If he had only had a mother, a real one,
himself, who had lived, she would have been one to whom he could have
told Bonnie's story, and she would have understood!

He looked into the pictured eyes on the wall and an idea came to him. It
was like an answer to prayer. Stephen Marshall's mother! Why hadn't he
thought of her before? She was that kind of a mother of course, or
Stephen Marshall would not have been the man he was! If the Bonnie girl
could only get to her for a little while! But would she take her? Would
she understand? Or might she be too overcome with her own loss to have
been able to rally to life again? He looked into the strong motherly
face and was sure _not_.

He would write to her. He would put it to the test whether there was a
mother in the world or not. He went back to his room, and wrote her a
long letter, red-hot from the depths of his heart; a letter such as he
might have written to his own mother if he had ever known her, but such
as certainly he had never written to any woman before. He wrote:

DEAR MOTHER OF STEPHEN MARSHALL:

I know you are a real mother because Stephen was what he
was. And now I am going to let you prove it by coming to you
with something that needs a mother's help.

There is a little girl--I should think she must be about
nineteen or twenty years old--lying in the hospital, worn
out with hard work and sorrow. She has recently lost her
father and mother, and had brought her little five-year-old
brother to the city a couple of weeks ago. They were living
in a very small room, boarding themselves, she working all
day somewhere down-town. Two days ago, as she was coming
home in the trolley, her little brother, crossing the street
to meet her, was knocked down and killed by a passing
automobile. We buried him to-day, and the girl fainted dead
away on the way back from the cemetery and only recovered
consciousness when we got her to the hospital. The doctor
says she has exhausted her vitality and needs to sleep for a
week and be fed up; and then she ought to go to some
cheerful place where she can just rest for a while and have
fresh air and sunshine and good, plain, nouri