ou cannot see him, David," she said, "because you have no
picture of him in your heart."

Well, then, did Mother have such a picture? If she did, why
could she not show him that picture? And please, Mother, where
did she keep that heart where the picture was?

Yes, to be sure, she had such a picture, but it was not of
David's father; it was of someone else, for she had never seen
David's father. In her heart was still another picture: it was a
memory which had to do with the sad nativity of her little boy.
So sad an event it was that she had left off being a head nurse
at the hospital, in order to become a mother by proxy.

David might some day come to know that there was a fogyish,
bachelor doctor who was almost a father in the same sort of
way--almost, but not quite, for the child had been left not to
him, but to her. A home, likewise, was her inheritance, a very
pretty little home and all else that had once belonged to the
real mother of the little boy.

A brave death she had died, that kinless widow at the hospital.
And how could it have been otherwise, when so large a faith was
hers in the nurse whose arm had gone lovingly around her, and
whose voice, many and many a time, had given comfort and had
known finally how to smooth the way to death?

But it was the Doctor's hand, not the hand of the nurse, that had
gently closed the mother's eyes upon her last long sleep; and it
was he, not the nurse, who had turned wofully away, and stared
and stared and stared out of the window.

Grave pictures were these that Mother kept in her heart, and
David was not to know how much he troubled her when he fell to
questioning; and that is why, in the midst of his endless
inquiries, he was wont to encounter the Great Never Mind.

Do you know what that is? It is a condition of soul common to all
mothers who have little boys that want to know things.

The worst of it is that one is expected to understand when he is
never to mind and when he _is_ to mind. They are not the same
thing; they are twins, and they are so hard to tell apart, and so
disagreeable, and act so much alike that only an expert can tell
which is which.

But Mother was an expert. She knew when you must and when you
mustn't; she had a talent for it. She also had a gift for telling
David that she would see. If he wanted to go swimming with Mitch
Horrigan in the creek near town, she said she would see about it,
but somehow she never did get it seen about.