unate lad. I couldn't speak. I
opened my mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I
asked any one for food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was
ashamed. I, who looked upon begging as a delightful whimsicality,
thumbed myself over into a true son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all
her bourgeois morality. Only the harsh pangs of the belly-need could
compel me to do so degraded and ignoble a thing as beg for food. And
into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and
ingenuous youth unused to mendicancy.

"You are hungry, my poor boy," she said.

I had made her speak first.

I nodded my head and gulped.

"It is the first time I have ever ... asked," I faltered.

"Come right in." The door swung open. "We have already finished
eating, but the fire is burning and I can get something up for you."

She looked at me closely when she got me into the light.

"I wish my boy were as healthy and strong as you," she said. "But he
is not strong. He sometimes falls down. He just fell down this
afternoon and hurt himself badly, the poor dear."

She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it
that I yearned to appropriate. I glanced at him. He sat across the
table, slender and pale, his head swathed in bandages. He did not
move, but his eyes, bright in the lamplight, were fixed upon me in a
steady and wondering stare.

"Just like my poor father," I said. "He had the falling sickness. Some
kind of vertigo. It puzzled the doctors. They never could make out
what was the matter with him."

"He is dead?" she queried gently, setting before me half a dozen
soft-boiled eggs.

"Dead," I gulped. "Two weeks ago. I was with him when it happened. We
were crossing the street together. He fell right down. He was never
conscious again. They carried him into a drug-store. He died there."

And thereat I developed the pitiful tale of my father--how, after my
mother's death, he and I had gone to San Francisco from the ranch; how
his pension (he was an old soldier), and the little other money he
had, was not enough; and how he had tried book-canvassing. Also, I
narrated my own woes during the few days after his death that I had
spent alone and forlorn on the streets of San Francisco. While that
good woman warmed up biscuits, fried bacon, and cooked more eggs, and
while I kept pace with her in taking care of all that she placed
before me, I enlarged the picture of that poor orphan bo