into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office."

"So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down
and tell me what kept you."

She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that
find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a
time when he had not seen those small hands in motion--shaping garments,
darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of
clocks. "I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes," she had once
explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in
the moment's interval between other tasks.

Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. "I was trying to find out
something about Dillon's case," he said.

His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and
reseated herself.

"Well?"

"I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this
evening."

"The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak."

"Luckily she's not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened
to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her
talk--till I told her of Disbrow's letter."

Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. "He's very bad,
then?"

"Hopelessly maimed!"

She shivered and cast down her eyes. "Do you suppose she really knows?"

"She struck me as quite competent to judge."

"A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?"

He raised his head with a vague look. "I never thought of asking her."

Mrs. Amherst laughed. "How like you! Did she say with whom she was
staying?"

"I think she said in Oak Street--but she didn't mention any name."

Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. "I wonder if she's not the
thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall
and rather handsome?"

"I don't know," murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was
humorously resigned to his mother's habit of deserting the general for
the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in
utter disregard of the main issue. But to-night, preoccupied with his
subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected
by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.

"How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!" was his
thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the
work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a gar