some she looked, with her red cheeks and her white hair, and her
thick black silk. One winter, when she had a dreadful cold, the Poor Boy
took her to Palm Beach in his car, and introduced all his smart friends
to her. But it was as if they had always known her, for the Poor Boy,
who talked a great deal, never talked for long without celebrating "my
nurse."

"Oh," he might say, "I, too, have known what it is to have a mother."

Or coming home late from some gay party, the sparkle still in his eyes,
he might say to the old woman herself:

"I love people, but I love you more."

Of the Poor Boy who gave her so much she had never asked but one thing.
One simple kindly act in the future. She had made him promise her that;
take his oath to it, indeed; cross his tender heart. She had made him
promise that when at last she lay dead, he would come to her and close
her eyes.

He would keep his word; not a doubt of it. But he would do more. He
would see to it that in Woodlawn, where his young father and mother lay,
old Martha should lie, too, and that the ablest sculptor of the time
should mark her grave for the ages.

The Poor Boy had the intuition of a woman, and the tenderness; he had
the imagination of a poet and the simplicity of a child. Everybody loved
him--the slim, well-knit, swift body, carrying the beautiful round head;
the face, so handsome, so gentle, and so daring. He was not cast in a
heroic mould, but he was so vivid that in groups of taller, stronger
men it was the Poor Boy whom you saw first. Half the girls did, anyway,
and most of the wives, and all the old grandmothers. The most ambitious
girls forgot that he was princely rich, and wanted him for himself
alone. But the "world-so-new-and-all" was cram-jammed with flowers, and
the Poor Boy was dazzled, and did not more than half make up his mind
which was the loveliest.

Old Martha was a firm believer in love at first sight (otherwise she
might never have been a wet-nurse), and often, when the Poor Boy came
home from some great gathering of people, she would ask him, "Did it
happen to yez?" And he knew what she meant, and teased her a little
sometimes, saying that he wasn't "just quite sure." (And he
wasn't--always.)

One day the world crashed about old Martha's ears. The Poor Boy stood up
in the court and said, "Not guilty," in his clear, ringing voice. But
they didn't believe her child, her angel, and when they sent him to
prison she tore her white hai